Despite the popular demand to "avenge Gordon", the Conservative government that came into office after the 1885 election did nothing of the sort. The Sudan was judged to be not worth the huge financial costs it would have taken to conquer it, the same conclusion that the Liberals had reached. After Khartoum, the Mahdi established his Islamic state which restored slavery and imposed a very harsh rule that according to one estimate caused the deaths of 8 million people between 1885 and 1898. In 1887, the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition under Henry Morton Stanley set out to rescue Dr. Emin Pasha, still holding out in Equatoria against the "Ansar". Many have seen the attempt to save Emin Pasha, a German doctor-biologist-botanist who had converted from Judaism first to Lutheranism and then (possibly) to Islam, and who had not been particularly famous in Europe until then, as a consolation prize for Gordon.