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previous decade and the aftermath of slave emancipation and the condition of indigenous societies exposed to European settlement. In the first development (with which Gordon was not entirely in sympathy), a principal consequence was reduction of defence expenditure by withdrawal of garrisons or by forcing colonists to pay for their own troops. The policy was a premise of W. E. Gladstone's period as chancellor of the exchequer from 1859 and was successfully implemented, with the exception of South Africa, by Edward Cardwell as secretary for war in the late 1860s. The second issue of post-emancipation rehabilitation which would seriously preoccupy Gordon in some of his governorships had as a corollary the reform of crown colony government in the West Indies and its refinement to various degrees of hierarchical dominance and fiscal frugality in captured territories (Mauritius, Ceylon) and in newly annexed ones such as Fiji.
As Gordon was to learn, he had to work through the political ministry of the day and the civil service officials of a department of state that was not a popular post among politicians and saw a swift turnover of secretaries of state in the period from 1854 to 1886. They varied remarkably in competence and ability. 19His allies and patrons among them were not necessarily of similar political persuasions, though that mattered less in an age when party allegiances were weak and loyalties to persons strong: hence his continuous practice of lobbying through other friends who could influence members of the government in power. The colonial office, however, was well served by its permanent under-secretaries during this period, Sir Frederic Rogers and Sir Robert Herbert, who both accumulated enormous experience during their years in post. Parliamentary under-secretaries could sometimes be relied on to support a governor's case. More certainly, some of the senior clerks, such as Sir Henry Taylor in the West Indies department, were a rich source of counsel and support in private correspondence and in representing a governor's proposals to a secretary of state.
However, at the outset Gordon inevitably encountered reluctance on the part of secretaries of state and colonial office officials to indulge his own estimates of his worth, faced as they were with other and often