FOOTNOTE:

Meanwhile the Greek insurrection had run its course of blood and devastation, and as yet out of its four years' chaos of desolation victory had not dawned upon either combatants. Ibrahim, the son of Mehemet Ali, had now carried an army of Egyptian and Nubian soldiers into the Morea, and men, women, and children were being slaughtered by this clever but cruel master of war. Till this time Napier had longed to throw his sword into the scale with the struggling Greeks, but his desire was tempered with a just determination that no premature or foolhardy action should give his enemies the opportunity he knew so well they longed for. He feared to find himself suddenly struck out of the army list, and his service of thirty years with all its toils and wounds thrown away. "When I saw Greece about to rise instrength and glory my resolve was to join her," he says, "if it could be done with advantage to her just cause and honour to myself. The talent of the people, and their warlike qualities, excited my admiration, for a Greek seems a born soldier, and has no thought but war. Their vanity and love of glory equal those feelings with the French, but the Greeks are more like the Irish than any other people; so like even to the oppression they suffer that, as I could not do good to Ireland, the next pleasure was to serve men groaning under similar tyranny."

In the autumn of 1825 the negotiations between him and the Greeks, which had previously fallen through owing to difficulties about his commission in the British army, were again resumed, and matters were all but concluded when a proclamation forbidding officers to serve the Greek cause was published in England. Still Napier was prepared to sever his connection with the army and throw in his lot with the Greeks, provided certain guarantees were given for the equipment and payment of a small regular force, and for the value of his own commission which would be sacrificed by the step. The Greeks in Greece were ready to assent to these propositions, and to any others which Napier might desire to stipulate, so anxious were they now in this dark hour of their fortune to secure his service as Commander-in-Chief; but the bond-holders in London, these curses of all good causes, had their own views as to what should be done, and they were more desirous of spending their money in sending out a useless fleet than in equipping the nucleus of a regular force, which under such a leader as Napier would have been of incalculable benefit toGreece. Thus the whole project fell to the ground, and Napier had to remain in Cephalonia for four years more, and to content himself with his roads and bridges, his purer administration of justice, his efforts to improve the lot of the husbandman, to lessen the unjust privileges of the nobles, to increase the produce of the island, and, harder than any of these things, to battle against ignorance in high places, against the sting of censure from stupidity and intolerance combined in command.[3]Yet in spite of factious opposition and ignorant enmity it is probable that the nine years which Napier spent in the Ionian Isles were the happiest of his life. Who can ever measure the enjoyment of these rides over the mountains and through the valleys of that beautiful island? For, with all the practical energy that marked his character, there was a deep poetic instinct in him that made him keenly sensible of the beauty of nature; while his love of reading, continued since boyhood, had stored his retentive memory with the historic traditions of the past. In a memoir on the Roads of Cephalonia, which he published in 1825, there is a description of the valley of Heraclia, lying on the eastern side of the island, which shows how thoroughly he appreciated beauty of scenery, and how well attuned was his mental ear to catch the music of those wondrous memories which float for ever around the isles and shores and seas of Greece.

But if Cephalonia held for Charles Napier some of the pleasantest memories of life, so did his period of residence in the island mark his final separation frommany loved companions of youth. In 1826 his mother died, and the long and most affectionate correspondence which had lasted from the early Celbridge days came to an end. Never indeed was her image to fade from his memory. To the last it was to remain with him, undimmed by distance or by time, coming to him in weary hours of trouble and disappointment, of glory and success; and as at his side in battle he always wore his father's sword, so in his heart he carried the memory of his mother, whose "beauteous face seemed to smile upon me," he tells us, in the most anxious moments of his Scindian warfare.

In 1830 Napier's Ionian service came to an end. He was recalled. It was the old story. Multiplied mediocrity had beaten individual genius. It is not only inevitable, it is even right that it should be so; for by such heating and blowing in the forge of life is the real steel fashioned which has flash and smite in it sufficient to reach us even through the tomb.

FOOTNOTE:[3]The gratitude of men for toil and service given to them is not so fleeting as people suppose. "They still speak of Napier in Cephalonia as of a god," said a Greek lady to the writer in this year, 1890.

[3]The gratitude of men for toil and service given to them is not so fleeting as people suppose. "They still speak of Napier in Cephalonia as of a god," said a Greek lady to the writer in this year, 1890.

Charles Napier in 1830 was to all human eyes a ruined man. He was close upon the fiftieth year of his age. He was miserably poor; he had a sick wife and two young children to maintain. "Worse than all," he writes, "I have no home, and my purse is nearly empty; verily all this furnishes food for thought." And bitter food it must have been. He was out of employment and under a cloud, for authority, often ready to justify its own injustice, was eager to use its powerful batteries of unofficial condemnation, to hint its doubts and hesitate its dislikes, and find reason for former neglect in this new proof of "temper neutralising brilliant qualities," or of "insubordination rendering promotion impossible." No employment, no home, no money, life's prime gone; toil, service, wounds, disease, all fruitless; and worse than all to such a nature, the tactless sympathy of the ordinary friend, and the scarce-veiled joy of the ordinary acquaintance—for the military profession is perhaps of necessity the one in which the weed of jealousy grows quickest, and nowhere else does the "down" of one man mean so thoroughly the "up" of another. When the shell takes the head off "poor Brown" it does notcarry away his shoes, and Jones is somewhere near to step into them.

Failure at fifty is terrible. The sand in the hour-glass of life is crumbling very fast away; the old friends of childhood are gone; a younger generation press us from behind; the next turn of the road may bring us in sight of the end. We have seen in the preceding chapters the extraordinary energy of Charles Napier in action. We shall now follow his life for ten years through absolute non-employment, and our admiration will grow when we find him still bearing himself bravely in the night of neglect, still studying the great problems of life, still keeping open heart to all generous sympathies, and never permitting the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" to drive him into the regions of apathy, callousness, or despair.

In the year 1830 England was in a strange state. The reform which sanguine men had looked for as close at hand fifteen years earlier had not yet come, but many things had come that had not been expected. France had shaken off the Bourbons; Belgium had shaken off the Dutch; the people had in fact righted themselves. The example was contagious. Throughout the length and breadth of England there arose an ominous murmur of discontent. It was clear that the limit of patience was being quickly reached, and if Parliament would not reform itself it ran a fair chance of being reformed in spite of itself. The accession of William the Fourth, the manifestation of the supremacy of popular will on the Continent, and the increasing pressure given by depression in manufacture andagriculture, all joined to produce a general conviction that the moment had arrived when reform could no longer be delayed. What then must have been the dismay and indignation of all men who were not blinded by faction to the true interests of England when in November, 1830, Wellington delivered in the House of Lords his famous anti-reform speech, telling the astonished country that the existing representative system possessed the full and entire confidence of the country, that any improvement on it was impossible, and that "so long as he held any station in the Government of the country he should always feel it his duty to resist any measure of parliamentary reform." This speech was read as a declaration of war. A fortnight after its delivery the Duke resigned office, the Whigs came in, but they sought rather to fence with the question than to solve it. The excitement became more intense, the country was literally as well as figuratively in a blaze. In the north of England incendiary fires burned continuously. In March the first Reform Bill was brought in by the Whigs; incomplete and emasculated though it was, to suit the tastes of opponents, it was still thrown out. Then Brougham, seeing that the hour had come for reform or revolution, stepped to the front, forced dissolution upon the reluctant King, and the great election of 1831 followed. The new House of Commons passed the Bill; the Lords threw it out. Popular rage rose higher than ever. There is one way to save the State. Let the King create new peers, and out-vote this obstinate faction in the Lords which is bent on resisting the will of the people. The King would not take this step, and the tide rose still higher. Bristol wasburnt. The funds were down to seventy-nine. The windows of Apsley House were broken. The Duke of Newcastle's castle at Nottingham was destroyed by the mob. Indignation meetings were everywhere convened to protest against the action of the Lords. An enormous meeting of one hundred and fifty thousand persons assembled in Birmingham, and unanimously resolved not to pay taxes until the Bill was passed. The winter of 1831-32 was spent in fruitless debates. "There is no hope but in violence; no chance of escaping a revolution," writes William Napier. In May, 1832, Lord Grey resigned because the King would not create new peers. Wellington was sent for by the King; for a fortnight he endeavoured to frame an anti-reform ministry, and then it was that popular indignation broke through all bounds and carried everything before it. The King had to come from Windsor to London, and from Hounslow to Buckingham Palace one long shout of discontent greeted the royal carriage. "No taxes until Reform"; "Go for gold and stop the Duke," were the cries that met Wellington when he drove to meet His Majesty at the Palace. A few days later he was mobbed and pelted with all kinds of missiles as he rode through the city. To make the insult more ominous it was the anniversary of Waterloo. Then the King gave way. Brougham and Grey came back to office, the Lords surrendered, and the Reform Bill became law.

It was into this seething state of politics that Charles Napier came back from the Ionian Isles. During the three years following his retirement from active employment, the pressure from straitened means, andthe sense of injustice under which he laboured, kept him much to himself. The terrible epidemic of cholera which swept England in 1832 very nearly made him one of its victims. Scarcely had he recovered from this fell disease than he was struck down by a terrible blow. In the summer of 1833 his wife died. Then at last the great heart of the man seemed to break. A leaf from his written thoughts at this time attests the agony he endured. "O God, merciful, inscrutable Being," he writes, "give me power to bear this Thy behest! Hitherto I had life and light, but now all is a dream, and I am in darkness, the darkness of death, the loneliness of the desert. I see life and movement and affection around me, but I am as marble. O God, defend me, for the spirit of evil has struck a terrible blow. I too, can die; but thus my own deed may give the dreadful spirit power over me, and I may in my haste to join my adored Elizabeth divide myself for ever from her. My head seems to burst. Oh, mercy, mercy! for this seems past endurance." What depths of agony these heroic natures know, as profound as the heights they climb to are immense! He arose from this sorrow chastened, but at the same time steeled to greater suffering. He hears that his enemies in London and Corfu are about to attack him in the Reviews. "I will assail in turn," he writes. "I am so cool, so out of the power of being ruffled by danger, that my fighting will be hard. The fear of being taken from my wife to a gaol made me somewhat fearful, when I wrote before, now I defy prosecution and every other kind of contest." In the end of 1833 he settled at Caen in Normandy. His life now was very dreary, and his letters show how small are the sorrows of disappointedambition compared with the blows which death deals to all. "Formerly," he writes, "when looking down from Portsdown Hill on Broomfield, which contained my wife and children, how great was my gratitude to God! My heart was on its knees if my body was not." Six months after his loss he writes: "I am well aware my fate might be much worse, but all my energy cannot destroy memory. This morning my eyes fell on the account of Napoleon bursting into tears when meeting the doctor who had attended Josephine at her death—what he felt at that moment I feel hourly, yet I am cheerful with others. My grief breaks out when alone—at no other time do I let it have its way; but when tears are too much checked, comes a terrible feel [sic] on the top of the head, which though not real pain distracts me, and my lowness then seems past endurance." Then he turns to the education of his two daughters, and lays down rules for their training, the foundation of all to be "religion, for to this I trust for steadiness." So the time passes. He remained in France for three years, and early in 1837 came back to England, taking up his residence in Bath. During these three years of absence he had been busy with his pen. His book onColonisationhad been followed by one onMilitary Law, a work the name of which very inadequately describes its nature, nor had he been left altogether outside the pale of official recognition, for in 1835 efforts were made to induce him to accept an appointment in Australia. These efforts were unsuccessful, and perhaps it was best that they should have failed, for, as in his book onColonisationhe had openly avowed his intention of guarding the rights of the aborigines, "and of seeing that the usualAnglo-Saxon method of planting civilisation by robbery, oppression, murder, and extermination of natives should not take place under his government," it is more than doubtful whether even his success in a Colonial Government could have been possible. It is singular to note in his views of colonisation how early he understood that Chinese labour could be made available to rough-hew a new country into shape. As to his general idea of government, it is summed up in a dozen words—words which should be nailed over the desk of every Government official from the Prime Minister to the humblest tide-waiter. "As to government, all discontent springs from unjust treatment. Idiots talk of agitators; there is but one in existence, and that isinjustice. The cure for discontent is to find out where the shoe pinches and ease it. If you hang an agitator and leave the injustice, instead of punishing a villain, you murder a patriot."

But this work was far more than a treatise upon Colonisation. A large portion of it was devoted to the exposure of the fatal effects inevitable from the system of large farm-cultivation then, and for so many years after, in wildest swing. Living in France at the time, he was able to compare the general level of comfort enjoyed there by the small proprietor with the misery of the labouring class in England. The boasted "wealth of England," he scornfully remarks, "is to her vast poor and pauper classes as the potato and 'pint' of the Irish labourer; the Irish may point his potato towards the wretched rasher suspended above the table, the English poor may speak with bated breath of the wealth of their country, but they are not to get the smallest taste of it." Clearly he predicts the day when the landed interestshall suffer for their accumulated sins, and he addresses them in anticipatory language such as Hannibal spoke in scorn to the Carthaginian Senate when they wept over the disasters of Carthage. "Ye weep for the loss of your money, not for the loss of your people. I laugh at your anguish, and my scorn for you is sorrow for Carthage." A book full of sense, of long and widely-gathered experience, of keen and trenchant reflection, all aflame against stupidity, wrongdoing, and official blundering; all abounding with sympathy for the weak, for the oppressed, for the suffering.

Shortly after his return to England his other book onMilitary Lawwas published. As we have already said, the title was misleading. The work treated on many subjects besides Military Law, and touched on a thousand points of military interest. It is in fact an elaborate treatise upon soldiers, their peculiarities, their virtues, and their shortcomings. He recalls with pride the fact that it was not at the door of the regular soldiers the atrocities of 1798 in Ireland could be laid, and remembers how when Hamilton Rowan's house was searched by the military, a single silver spoon that was taken was restored to its owner, although, adds Napier at the time, "I saw the Castle of Dublin filled with the rich and powerful, many among them daily robbing the silver spoons of the public." But in this book, as in all his writing, there is one subject upon which he is never tired. It is the man in the ranks. How intimately he knew that man, how truly he loved him, all these multiplied pages of journals, letters, and books tell. He has not the gift of that sublime and eloquent language in which his brother has made the deeds of the British soldier inthe Peninsular War immortal—that English classic which, like a stately temple of old, so grand amid the puny efforts of later architecture, stands out amid modern word-building in a magnificence of diction that becomes more solemn and stately with the growth of time; but if this rare gift is wanting in Charles Napier, every pulse of his own soldier nature beats for the man in the ranks. He has seen him at all times and in all places. He knows his weakness and his heroism; he is never tired of labouring for his improvement or his benefit. The word "soldier" in his eyes obliterates national boundaries and abolishes the distinctions of creed, colour, or country. He can love and admire the soldiers who are fighting against him, provided only that they fight bravely. The French drummer who saved his life at Corunna is never forgotten. "Have I a right to supporters?" he asks, when he hears he has been made a Knight of the Bath. "If so, one shall be a French drummer for poor Guibert's sake." The chief purpose he had in view when writing on Military Law was the abolition of flogging, at least in peace time, in the army. "It is odious and unnecessary in peace," he writes. "Our father was always against it, and he was right. The feeling of the country is now too strong to bear it longer, and the Horse Guards may as well give way at once as be forced to do so by Parliament later on." This was in 1837, but more than forty years had to pass before the "cat" was done to death.

When the general election took place in 1837 Napier was in Bath, where politics were running very high. Roebuck contested the seat in the Radical interest and was beaten. Charles Napier supported him with might andmain, and his comments on the election are curious. "The Tories, especially the women, are making a run against all the Radical shops. Can we let a poor devil be ruined by the Tories because he honestly resisted intimidations and bribery? Nothing can exceed the fury of the old Tory ladies." Evidently many things in this world are older than they seem to us to-day.

Napier had reached his fifty-sixth year; for eight years he had been unemployed. He was now a major-general, but his half-pay was wretchedly inadequate to his necessities, and he felt that the shadow of age could not be much longer delayed. Poverty, neglect, old age, obscurity—these were the requitals of a life as arduous, as brave, as honourable, and as devoted to duty as any recorded in our military annals. Fired by the news that he was again to be passed over for some appointment, he made in this year, 1838, a last appeal for justice. In this letter he reviews his long service, beginning at Corunna thirty years earlier. He shows how junior officers who had served under his orders had received rewards and promotion, and how favours denied to him as "being impossible" had been given to others whose record of battle and wound had not been equal to his own. In the end of the letter the fear that is in his heart comes out. He hopes that "consideration may be shown to his long services—services which at fifty-six years of age cannot be much longer available." Still no work for this tireless worker. Then he goes back to his books, writes a romance calledHarold, edits De Vigny'sLights and Shades of Military Life, and turning his attention again to Ireland, publishes an essay addressed to Irish absentees on the state of Ireland. But now the longnight was wearing out. In March, 1839, he received in Ireland, where he has been living for six months, a summons from Lord John Russell. He proceeds at once to London, is offered and accepts the command of the northern district, where the working classes, justly enraged at having been used by the Whigs to wring reform from their enemies, and then flung aside and denied all representative power, were now combining in dangerous numbers to force from the men they had put in office the several reforms of the Constitution which were grouped under the title of Charter. Taking from the example of the Whigs the threat of physical force which that party had not scrupled to use in their struggle for reform, the Chartists openly avowed their intention of redressing their wrongs by arms. In offering the command of the north of England to Napier the Government showed signal judgment, for on all the important points of the Charter—vote by ballot, manhood suffrage, and short parliaments—he was himself a Chartist; but he well knew that of all evils that can visit man that of civil war is the very worst, and while on the one hand he would tell the governing powers that the tide of true popular right can only be finally regulated by the floodgates of concession timely opened, he would equally let destructive demagogues know that if physical force was to be invoked he, as a soldier, was its master.

In the spring of 1839 Napier assumed the command of the north of England. The first entry in his journal is significant. "Here I am," he writes on April 4th in Nottingham, "like a bull turned out for a fight after being kept in a dark stall." He had been in this dark stall for more than nine years. He had just arrived from London, where he had had many interviews with Lord John Russell and other governing authorities. That these glimpses of the source and centre of power had not dazzled his mind out of its previous opinions another extract from the journal will show. "Lord John Russell and the Tories are far more to blame than O'Connor in my opinion. The Whigs and the Tories are the real authors of these troubles, with their national debt, corn-laws, and new poor-law."

The condition of England at this time was indeed precarious, yet it was inevitable. The remedy of reform, delayed until the last moment of an obstinate opposition, had excited hopes in the minds of the masses that could not be realised. "The poor you will have always with you." As well might the victim of hopeless disease expect to spring from the bed of sickness in perfecthealth and vigour after the first spoonful of his black draught as the deep-seated poverty of England look for cure in the black letter of the most radical statute; but there is the difference between making the best of the bad bargain of life and making the worst of it, and that is exactly the difference between the men who object to all change and those who hold that change must ever be the vital principle of progression.

But although the operation of laws can only be gradual to cure, however rapid they may be to cause, the great mass of the people of England looked to immediate relief from their sufferings as the certain result of the popular triumph of reform. They were doomed to disappointment on the very threshold of victory. During the last three years of the protracted struggle the Whigs had invoked the physical aid of the people, and there can now be little doubt that it was that physical aid which had finally decided the battle. When Birmingham threatened to march on London, and when enormous masses of people in the large cities of the kingdom pledged themselves not to pay taxes until the Reform Bill was made law, privilege ceased its opposition. But the people had fought for themselves as well as for the Whigs, and when the victory was gained they found the Whigs alone had got the spoils. The people were as much in the cold as ever. The three great anchors of a pure and true representative system of government—the ballot, manhood suffrage, and short parliaments—were notoriously absent from the new scheme. It was only to be a change of masters, and a change that by no means promised well, for the old Tory landholder with all his faults and his prejudices was generally agentleman, always an Englishman, and often a humane man; but this new mill-lord was often a plutocrat, always a shrewd man of business, and generally one who reckoned his operatives as mill-hands, and never troubled himself about their heads or their hearts. Thus, instead of a sudden realisation of benefit the people found themselves worse off than ever, lower wages, new and oppressive poor-laws, no voice in the law-making, and quite at the mercy, wherever they possessed the limited franchise, of the will of their masters. Little was it to be wondered at, therefore, that in the seven years following reform they should have grown more and more discontented, and that, borrowing from their old Whig leaders the lesson of force so successfully set by those chiefs, they should have everywhere formed themselves into an association prepared to pass the bounds of peaceful agitation in support of their demand for manhood suffrage, the ballot, and short parliaments. All these principles of Chartism Charles Napier well knew long before he accepted the northern command, but of the actual starvation and abject misery of the lower orders in the great manufacturing towns he knew little; and side by side with his military movements and plans in case of attack we find him from the first equally busy in the study of the state of the people, and equally urgent in his representations to the Government, that whilehewould answer for the order and peace of the moment,theymust initiate and carry out the legislation which would permanently relieve, if it could not cure, this deep distress and widespread suffering.

It is wonderful to mark in his letters, reports, and journals how quickly he has mastered the complicatedsituation which surrounds him. Three weeks after he has taken command he has the military position secured. He will have three distinct groups of garrisons, with three points of concentration, and plans for separate or for united action. He has all the local magistrates against him, because they alone think of their individual towns, villages, or private houses, and they want troops scattered broadcast over the country. The Bradford Justice of the Peace would willingly see Manchester, Leeds, and Newcastle given to the flames provided his own city had a soldier billeted in every attic; then a great local potentate would suddenly rush off to London and threaten the Home Office with terrible dangers if his particular park had not the three arms surrounding it. Notwithstanding all difficulties Napier works away, gets the troops into strategical positions, and, though he hates the work, throws all his energies into it. Here we have his plans and his opinions four weeks after he has taken command.

My men should be in three masses, one around Manchester, one around Newcastle to watch the colliers, one around Leeds and Hull to watch the other two; but such an arrangement of my force can only be effected in time. It would take a month to make the Secretary of State understand it, and then he would have a host of magistrates on his back. He behaves, however, very well, and stands by me against the magistrates, so that I have my own way in some degree. Were it allowed me in all things the country would soon be quieted. Poor fellows! they only want fair play and they would then be quiet enough, but they are harassed by taxes until they can bear it no longer. We could manage a large force of Chartists; but I trust in God nothing so horrible will happen. Would that I had gone to Australia, and thus been saved this work, produced by Toryinjustice and Whig imbecility! The doctrine of slowly reforming while men are famishing is of all silly things the most silly—starving men cannot wait; and that the people of England have been and are ill-treated and ill-governed is my fixed opinion. The worship of mammon renders the minds of men base, their bodies feeble, and their morals bad. Manufactures debase man, woman, and child.

All through the summer of 1839 this work goes on. On May 25th a great meeting took place on Kersall Moor near Manchester. It passed over quietly. Napier had concentrated two thousand men and four guns in the vicinity, and he had further taken the original precaution of getting an introduction to a meeting of Chartist leaders, and telling them plainly that if they meant only to lay their grievances before Parliament they would have no opposition from him, and that neither soldier nor policeman would be allowed to disturb them, but that if there was the least disturbance of the peace he would use the force he had to quell it. Another step he took too in this same direction of prevention which should not be lost sight of. He had heard that the Chartists were very confident that their possession of five or six brass cannon was of immense importance to them, and that when the day of action would arrive these guns would give them victory. He at once secretly invites a leading Chartist chief to visit with him the artillery-barrack while the gunners are at work. The battery is drawn up, the command is given to dismount the guns, remount them and come into action. It is done in the usual brilliant and rapid manner, and the Chartist chief goes away from the parade not quite so confident that the five old brass carronades which arehidden away under some backyard rubbish will be equal to meet in action these perfectly served guns.

I have read many things in the life of this soldier, but nothing that does greater honour to him than this desire to use every means in his power to prevent the effusion of civil blood. There is in almost every military mind a pride of arms that tends to prevent a soldier taking any step with his enemies which might even remotely seem to be an avoidance of strife; but in this instance, when civil war is trembling in the balance, when the magistrates and many of the Government officials are calling out for vigorous measures, when Whigs and Tories are jointly agreed that stern repression is to be the rule of politics, we find the real soldier anxious only to avoid spilling the blood of his countrymen, ready to forget his own pride of arms, and to show the leaders of this multitude how useless must be their attempt to right their wrongs by force of arms.

In all this anxious time we find the mind of the man as keen to catch absurdities and note defects of system, military or civil, as it was in the past. Here is a bit of criticism, good to-day as when it was written fifty years ago. "I cannot conceive," he writes to an artillery officer, "how my account of barrack accommodation differs from yours. But this and other difficulties and irregularities proceed from the monstrous absurdity of giving the army half a dozen heads instead of one. The Ordnance alter your barracks, yet I know nothing of it, because we belong to separate armies—one under the Master-General of the Ordnance, the other under the Master-General of the Cavalry and Infantry. Thencomes a third, the Master-General of Finance. Last, not least, the Master-General of the Home Office, more potent than all. Besides these, you and I have our little masters-general, the magistrates. God help the poor English army among so many cooks. Were it broth it would have been spoiled long ago." Just fourteen years later the Masters-General and their armies of conflicting clerks were to prove themselves more formidable destroyers of the English army in the Crimea than all the generals and soldiers of the Russian Czar.

The danger being for the moment past, Napier has time to run round his garrisons, and then up to London for twenty-four hours to be invested by the Queen with the Ribbon of the Bath. For many years he has not mixed with or seen his old comrades of Peninsular days; now he meets them at the Palace—alas! "worn, meagre, gray-headed, stooping old men, sinking fast! When we had last been together we were young, active, full of high spirits—dark or auburn locks. Now all are changed, all are parents, all full of cares. Well, the world is chained hand to hand, for there were also young soldiers there, just fledged, meet companions for their young Queen. They too will grow old, but will they have the memory of battles when like us they hurry towards the grave?" Fifty years have gone by, and Time has answered the last query. The fledglings of that day are now white and bent and broken, and when their old eyes gaze into the winter firelight, the Alma's height, the long valley of Balaklava, the slope of Inkermann, or the snow-clad mounds of the great siege rise before them, even as Corunna and Busaco and Fuentes d'Onoro and the breach at Badajos came back to the older veterans.

The picture given in Napier's journal is one that would have been worth painting, so full of contrast was it, so deep-set in history. "There was our pretty young Queen receiving our homage, and our old shrivelled bodies and gray heads were bowed before her throne, intimating our resolution to stand by it as we had stood when it was less amiably filled. I wonder what she thought of us old soldiers! We must have appeared to her like wild beasts. Lord Hill is old and has lost his teeth, poor Sir John Jones looked like a ghost, and Sir Alexander Dickson is evidently breaking. Thinking how these men had directed the British thunders of war I saw that death was the master. The brilliance of the Court vanished, and the grim spectre stared me in the face. His empire is creeping over all!"

During the summer of 1839 the Chartist agitation went on, and more than once England was on the verge of actual rebellion. Napier's position was a very peculiar one. Thoroughly in sympathy with the people in the objects they had in view, but sternly opposed to any attempt to obtain these objects by force, he ran the danger of falling between the two stools of opinion and duty. He was at this time sailing upon a very dangerous sea, and a single false movement might have involved England in bloodshed. In his letters and reports to his civil and military superiors we find the line ever distinctly drawn between the immediate repression of disorder, which he can answer for at any moment, and the permanent remedy for the evil, which must be the work of the Government. To the military authorities these expressions of opinion on the part of their subordinate appear utterly unprecedented. Napier has told theCommander-in-Chief that he can see no way to meet the evils but to concede to the people their just rights, while the principle of order is at the same time vigorously upheld. The answer to this is suggestive of many thoughts. "Lord Hill desires me to point out your observation and to suggest that you avoid all remarks having allusion to political questions; and I am to say, without entering into the merits of the question, that neither he, as Commander-in-Chief, nor you, as the Major-General commanding the Northern District, can have anything to do with the matter; it is therefore better that you should confine yourselves to what is strictly your provinces as military men." And there is another fact revealed to us in the pages of Napier's correspondence at this time which must strike the reader of to-day as strange. It is told in his account of a public dinner to which he was invited in September, 1839. He had accepted the invitation, thinking it would not be a party demonstration; but he soon found he was mistaken. All the great ones of the county were assembled, with the Lord-Lieutenant in the chair. "Church and State" was the first toast, and it was received with rapturous approval. Then, in the second place, came the health of the Queen. "Glasses were filled," writes Napier, "but not a sound of applause followed. Her Majesty's health was drunk in significant silence. No man cried 'God bless her' except myself. Then came 'The Queen Dowager [the widow of William the Fourth] and the rest of the royal family.' Instantly the room shook with shouts of applause." "You are in the wrong box, General," whispered Napier's right-hand neighbour, one of the members for the county. "So it seems, my lord," answers the irate soldier; "and thereigning Queen is in it too." How strangely this episode reads to-day; yet at the time it was common enough in the ranks of the Tory party. It was only a few years earlier that a widespread conspiracy was afloat among the men who called themselves the True Blues of their party to shut out the Princess Victoria from the throne and substitute the Duke of Cumberland for the succession. How far this conspiracy extended will not perhaps be fully known in our day; but in point of absolute loyalty to the person of the sovereign it is probable that the "rebel" Chartists at the time had a good deal more of it than had some of the supporters of Church and State who were so anxious to shoot them down.

Placed thus between the devil of the classes and the deep sea of the masses it is easy to surmise that Napier had no pleasant berth in this his first command as a general officer. Frequently we find him regretting his refusal of the Australian appointment two years earlier, and picturing to himself a land where men worked in the open air instead of in collieries or factories, a land where taxes were light and people were contented, and the grades of life were not marked by terrible extremes. Here are a few thoughts from his journal, worth in their plain truth and honest judgment many tons weight of the rubbish which the political economists of that time and since have poured forth to the world. "I was mad," he writes in August, 1839, "not to go out as governor of Australia. I could have founded there a great kingdom, with a systematic education, annual parliaments, and the abolition of the law of primogeniture as regards land. I would have so ruled Australia that the land should never have been thus collected."Then he goes on to the question of what constitutes the true prosperity of a nation. "Men," he writes, "are restless and discontented with poverty in manufacturing places. They have all its sufferings and have not those pleasures which make people content under it, that is, health, enjoyment of country life, fresh air, and interest in the seasons and in the various products of nature. The exhausted, unhealthy manufacturer has no such enjoyment; he has no resources but gin, gambling, and all kinds of debauchery. The countryman worships God, the manufacturer worships gold, and thus the practice of sin united to mammon-worship makes the ruffian. Yet such is the system which your political economists call the prosperity of the nation. Hell may be paved with good intentions, but it is assuredly hung with Manchester cottons." As the year 1839 drew to a close, the starvation and misery seemed to deepen over the northern command. In November we read, "The streets of this town [Manchester] are horrible. The poor starving people go about in twenties and forties begging, but without the least insolence; and yet some rich villains and some foolish women choose to say they try to extort charity. It is a lie, an infernal lie; neither more nor less. Nothing can exceed the good behaviour of these poor people, except it be their cruel sufferings." Hard as had been his nine long years of inaction, and welcome as work was to his brain and hand hungry for toil, Napier loathes the employment which carries with it the danger of having to take the lives of his fellow-countrymen. On January 16th, 1840, we find him writing the following entry in his journal: "Anniversary of the battle of Corunna. Oh, that I should haveoutlived that day to be at war with my own countrymen! Better be dead than live to see a civil war!" In the summer of 1841 a rumour reaches him that he is soon to be offered an Indian command. The old fighting spirit kindles at once in his heart. It will be a pleasant change to the Indus, on the very threshold of the Afghan country where war is raging, from this northern district, where his command is "slavery under noodles." "Gladly shall I get away," he writes, "from this district; for how to deal with violence produced by starvation, by folly, by villainy, and even by a wish to do right, is a hard matter. A man is easily reconciled to act against misled people if he has an honest plan of his own; but if he is only a servant of greater knaves than those he opposes, and feels he is giving strength to injustice, he loses the right stimulus to action."

When Sir Charles Napier set out for India in the autumn of 1841 he was, in the ordinary sense of the word, an old man. He was sixty years of age. More than forty years earlier he had begun his military career. Thirty-two years had passed since he had fought at Corunna; and since then what a life of action had been his! And yet this little thin figure, with eagle eye and beaked nose, and long hair streaked with white, which for more than forty years seemed to have been a volcano ever in action, had not yet spent the vast stock of vital energy which it started with. Very far from it. After all his wounds and wanderings, his shipwrecks and disasters, his sorrows and sicknesses, his blows and buffetings, here he was starting out for India, far more full of energy than ten out of a dozen ensigns going out from college to begin life.

On December 13th, 1841, Napier first set foot in India. He had come out by the overland route in two months, and looked upon the journey as a marvel of rapidity. It had cost him very dear; and when he landed in Bombay he had exactly two pounds in his pocket, and his bank-account wasnil. "Had I thendied," he writes, "there was not a farthing left for my children," and he was sixty years of age!

When Napier assumed command of the Poonah Division in the end of 1841, our dominion in India had entered upon a very critical stage of its history. Two years before this date we had sent an army into Afghanistan, ostensibly to seat a rival Ameer on the throne of Cabul—in reality to gain a footing in that mountain land. It was an Asiatic copy of Napoleon's invasion of Spain; and although the Afghans had no outside power to help them, the result was much the same as it had been in the Peninsula. There was at first an apparently easy conquest of the country, then a rising of the people, a retreat and surrender of the invaders, followed by fresh invasions carried on with the savage accessories usual where conquest endeavours to legalise its position by calling a people who are rightly struggling in the cause of their freedom "rebels." At this particular moment—the mid-winter of 1841—a great disaster had befallen our arms. The garrison of Cabul, retreating from that place towards the Kyber Pass, had been annihilated in the defiles of Jugdulluck; the general, a few officers, and their wives having alone been saved by surrender. The two civil organisers of the invasion, M'Naughten and Burnes, had been killed, one in Cabul, the other at a conference with Akbar Khan. Sale still held Jellalabad with an Irish battalion; but the Kyber Pass was between him and India, and that defile was in possession of the Afghans. On the western side of Afghanistan our army held Ghuznee, Candahar, and Quetta; but again the Bolan Pass lay between our forces and Upper Scinde, where a smallBritish army was cantoned on the Indus. When the news of these disasters, always magnified by native rumour, reached the countries which still intervened between our real Indian frontier and Afghanistan—Scinde and the Punjaub—signs of ill-concealed satisfaction began to manifest themselves among the princes and peoples of these still semi-independent States. This Afghan expedition had indeed been a wild and foolish venture, and the first blast of misfortune showed at once the full length and breadth of its absurdity. As each succeeding mail from the northern frontier brought to Bombay some fresh development of this critical situation, Napier bent his mind to master the complicated position of affairs; for daily it became more clear to his practised eye that the forces available on the Indian frontier were not adequate to retrieve the military situation, and that sooner or later he would be sent to the theatre of operations. When the crisis becomes really acute, favouritism lowers its front, and genius sees the road clear for action.

And now at last the chance came—the chance of leading an army of his countrymen in battle, the opportunity which he had longed for through all these weary years since that distant day when, writing to his mother from Hythe, he told her that his highest ambition was to live to command British soldiers in the field. That was just forty years ago, and here at last came the long-wished-for boon; but under what changed conditions! "Oh for forty as at Cephalonia," he writes, "when I laughed at eighteen hours' work under a burning sun; now at sixty how far will my carcass carry me? No great distance! Well, to try is glorious! Iam hurrying fast towards the end; it will be fortunate to reach it in the hour of victory. Who would be buried by a sexton in a churchyard rather than by an army in the hour of victory?"

In March, 1842, Lord Ellenborough arrived in India as Governor-General. From Madras he wrote to Napier asking the latter to send him a statement of his views with respect to the manner in which the honour of our arms may be most effectually re-established in Afghanistan. The request found Napier prepared. At once a clear and precise plan was forwarded to meet the new Governor-General on his arrival at Calcutta. We must avenge the disasters to our arms, but how? By "a noble, generous, not a vindictive warfare," after which "it might be very practicable to retire from Afghanistan, leaving a friendly people behind us." What a grand type of soldier this! No military executions, no hanging of men whose only fault was a splendid and heroic love of their own land! Truly the dominion based on such old-world chivalry could laugh at the advance of the Russian—it would not need "a scientific frontier" to defend it.

As the year 1842 progressed, the state of Afghanistan still remained critical. In July Candahar and Jellalabad were still our advanced posts, and all the intervening valleys and defiles were in the hands of the Afghans. Behind, in the Punjaub and in Scinde, the spectacle of delay and indecision on the part of our generals was spreading wider the area of disturbance. Clearly some real chief was wanted to hold together all this wavering discontent which was seething from the sources of the Sutlej to the sea at Kurachee. At last the order came to moveto Scinde. Napier received it on the anniversary of the battle of the Coa, fought thirty-two years earlier. At first the recollection that he is now in his sixty-first year, and that he has to leave behind him all he holds dear in life to go out to incessant action in a terrible climate, damps his spirit, but he quickly rallies. He will not even depend upon the advice of the "politicals," as he calls the Civil Servants in Scinde, who for once are to be subject to his orders. These men may be useful, he thinks, but that usefulness "cannot be as councillors to a general officer who should have none but his pillow and his courage." And so with these sentiments and a thousand others equally characteristic of indomitable resolution, courage, and self-dependency, he sets out for Scinde on September 3rd, 1842. "Old Oliver's day," he writes; "the day he won Dunbar and Worcester, and the day he died; and a very good day to die on, as good as the second or the fourth—'a crowning victory,' strange."

On the evening of the 3rd theZenobiasteamed out of Bombay harbour bound for Kurachee. Never did soldier proceed to the scene of action under more terrible conditions. The vessel carried a detachment of two hundred European troops. Scarcely had she put to sea before cholera of the most fatal type broke out among these soldiers. There was but one doctor on board, few medicines, no preparations to meet such a catastrophe. In an hour after the first case appeared many more had been attacked. Night fell. Drenching rain added to the horror. Scarcely were men attacked ere they died in contortions and agony impossible to describe. The beds of the stricken soldiers were laid on deck; and as they died the bodies were instantly cast overboard. All nightlong this terrible scene went on. When morning dawned twenty-six bodies had been thrown into the sea. For three days this awful scene continued. One-fourth of the entire troops had perished; eighty more men were down on the reeking, filthy deck. It was a time to try the sternest nerve. The worst scene of carnage on the battle-field could be nothing to this awful visitation. At last the port of Kurachee was gained; the flame of the fell disease seemed to have burned itself out; the survivors were got on shore, but a dozen more unfortunates were doomed to perish on land. In eight days sixty-four soldiers—just a third of the entire number embarked—had died; a few sailors, women, and children also perished.

Bad as was this beginning, it did not seem to damp the spirit or dull the energy of the commander. On September 10th he got on shore with his sick and dying. On the 12th he reviews the garrison of Kurachee, and looks to his ammunition and supplies. Before leaving Bombay he had visited the arsenal there, and had discovered some rockets lying in a corner. He had always a fondness for these somewhat erratic engines of war, and he brought them on with him to Scinde. Now at this review he determines to try one or two of them in front of the troops. An artillery officer, an engineer officer, and the General formed a kind of committee for letting off the missile, no one knowing apparently much about it. The second rocket would not go off when lighted; the committee incautiously approached, the rocket exploded, and the General's leg was cut clean across the calf by a sharp splinter of the iron case. This wound laid him up for a few days; but in a week, unable to stand the confinement any longer, he is carried on boarda river steamer and proceeds up the Indus. Certainly a bad continuation to a bad beginning this accident. Yet Napier had good reason to hope that whatever else might stop his career it would not be his legs, for in the past, though sorely tried, they had stood to him well. As a boy at Celbridge he had, while leaping a fence, cut the flesh from his leg in a terrible manner; a few years later at Limerick he had smashed the bone while jumping a ditch to secure a dead snipe. Again, at Corunna, a bullet had damaged this unfortunate leg; and here now at Kurachee, thirty-three years later, this rocket has another gash at it. No use; he "will get the snipe" up this great Indus river, as forty-four years ago he got it on the banks of the Shannon.

And now, leaving this old veteran, but ever-young soldier, steaming up the great river by whose shores he is soon to become the central figure in a long series of great events, we will pause a moment to review the chapter of Scindian history which had led up to this moment.

In the year 1836 Afghanistan lay many hundred miles beyond our nearest frontier, and it is almost needless to say that Russia then lay many thousand miles beyond the farthest extreme of Afghanistan. Nevertheless it was determined by the Viceroy of India and his Council to invade Afghanistan across the intervening Sikh and Scindian territory, in order to upset the ruler of the first-named State, and to seat upon the throne of Cabul a king who had long been our puppet and our pensionary. It is of course unnecessary to add that our puppet and our pensionary was, in return for thisservice, to hand over to us the legs of his throne, the keys of his kingdom, and a good deal of the contents of his treasury. Between our frontier and that of Afghanistan lay the Punjaub and Scinde, through which States we were to invade the territory of Dost Mahomed by the passes of the Khyber and the Bolan. With the ruler of the Punjaub, Runjeet Singh, we were upon terms of closest offensive and defensive amity. He was, in fact, our ally in the invasion. With the rulers of Scinde, on the other hand, our relations were strained. Runjeet was rich, had a large army, and was a single despotic ruler. The Ameers of Scinde were rich too, but they had no regular army. They were fighting among themselves, filled with mutual jealousies, weak rulers of a separated State. The line of policy pursued towards these States by the Calcutta Government was a very obvious if a very flagrant one. Runjeet Singh, the Lion of Lahore, was to be bribed into acquiescence in our Afghan policy, by slices of territory taken from Afghanistan and Scinde, by large promises of plunder to be given him by Shah Soojah, our puppet king, and by subsidies from our own treasury. But with the Ameers of Scinde the process was to be altogether one of force. Pressed by an army on the middle Indus, by the Sikhs from the Punjaub, and by a flotilla on the coast, they were to be squeezed into compliance with our demands, which included cession of territory, fortresses, and seaports, payment of treasure to Shah Soojah, annual subsidies to ourselves, and rights of passage for troops and supplies. All these matters having been arranged to the complete dissatisfaction of the weak but indignant Ameers, our armies pressed on into the Khyber on one hand and theBolan on the other. This was in 1838. We have already seen the final outcome of this forward Afghan policy in the early months of 1842. That the events in the Koord-Cabul and Jugdulluck Passes, when a single surviving horseman bore to Jellalabad the tidings of a disaster almost unparalleled in the annals of retreating armies, should have been received by the Ameers of Scinde without regret is not to be wondered at, and that they should see in it some opportunity of loosening the grasp of our power upon a territory which we still continued to speak of as independent is equally no subject of astonishment.

When Lord Ellenborough arrived in India in the spring of 1842 he was face to face with immense difficulties. The forward Afghan policy had collapsed. To an ignorant and presumptuous confidence paralysis and fear had succeeded. What was to be done? To reverse the engines and go full speed astern would only run the vessel of Indian policy upon the shoals and quicksands which the former mistaken and most unjust statecraft had produced. Napier knew all this nefarious history when he went to Scinde, but he knew too the utter impossibility of getting again into deep water by a recurrence to an absolutely just policy with the rulers of Scinde. He and his master, Lord Ellenborough, were the inheritors of this trouble. They had not made it, but assuredly they would be measured by it. In India, to go forward has often been to go wrong, but to go back in that country has always been to admit the wrong; and once to do that is to admit the truth of an argument which, if prolonged to its fullest consequences, must lead us to the sea-coast. What then was to be done?Reconquer Afghanistan; give it up to its old ruler again, and then fix the frontier of India at the frontier of Afghanistan. That was practically the policy determined upon by Lord Ellenborough, and when he made Charles Napier the right arm of its accomplishment he had secured the best pilot then navigating the troubled sea of English dominion in the East.

But when this policy had been once decided on, it would have been better to have openly admitted the necessity, and to have told the Ameers of Scinde plainly our intentions; let them then fight us if they liked. That course would have probably saved a vast effusion of blood. It certainly would have prevented the long and unhappy years of quarrel and recrimination that followed the conquest of Scinde, and the spectacle of two gallant and noble soldiers waging a lifelong war between each other upon the methods by which that conquest had been effected. Of this last phase, however, of the Scindian question we will speak later on.

Steaming up the Indus, Napier reached Hyderabad on September 25th, and had an interview with the Ameers of Scinde. They received him with extraordinary state and honour, for already the tide of war in Afghanistan had turned. Two armies marching from Jellalabad and Candahar had retaken Cabul, and another retiring from the Bolan would soon be on the middle Indus; while a general, of whom fame spoke highly, had just arrived with fresh troops at Kurachee.

Napier passed on from this reception, and early in October arrived at Sukkur, where important letters from Lord Ellenborough reached him; at the same time he received news that the English army had safely passedthe Bolan, and that the war in Afghanistan was therefore closed. And now, for the first time in the life of this extraordinary soldier, we arrive at a point where the path is not clear. The situation which at this moment confronted him was perhaps as difficult a one as ever presented itself to a soldier-ruler in our time. The course pursued by Napier was long the subject of fierce controversy. Volumes were written upon it. It was angrily debated in Parliament, angrily commented upon in the Press, and as angrily defended and applauded on the other side. All this is long over; the heat, the fury, and the bitter words have passed with the generation that saw and read in the flesh of the doings on the Indus. The conquest of Scinde has taken its place in history, and we can now quietly estimate the difficulties, the rights, the wrongs, and what perhaps was stranger than all, the temptations of the time. We will lightly touch upon them all, remembering that our path lies upon the ashes of dead heroes. First for the situation. It was this. A great shock had just been given to the sagacity of British government in India, and what was more important, to the prestige of British arms in Asia. We had retreated from Afghanistan, after avenging our defeat it is true, but still by the fact of that retreat acknowledging that our policy had been wrong, and that our power of enforcing that policy had not been equal to its ambition. That was a very serious position for a power whose dominion in the East rested solely on the sword, and nowhere was it so serious as in the neutral borderlands through which we had passed in order to invade Afghanistan—the lands whose natural rights we had trenched upon, and whose sentiments of independencewe had repeatedly outraged during the five years of this unfortunate enterprise. Now one fact was very clear to the Viceroy in Calcutta and to his lieutenant in Scinde—either we must withdraw altogether from the Indus, or we must strengthen our position there. The first course was altogether out of the question, the second became a necessity. Lord Ellenborough directed Napier to draft a new treaty, told him to present it to the Ameers, and if necessary to enforce its acceptance by arms. So far all was clear. In November, 1842, the new treaty was ready for presentation to the Ameers. Its provisions were indeed formidable. It took from the rulers of Scinde, towns, territory, rights of coinage, etc., and it especially dealt severely with the northern or Khyrpoor Ameers, who were rightly or wrongly suspected of having been desirous of profiting by the Afghan disasters in the preceding year. Two men of a widely different character appear at this moment upon the scene—Major James Outram of the Indian army, now political agent in Scinde, and His Highness Ali Moorad, one of the Ameers of Khyrpoor. No braver soldier ever bore the arms of England in the East than James Outram. No baser intriguer ever schemed and plotted for his own advancement than Ali Moorad of northern Scinde. Napier presented his treaty to the Ameers, and at the same time moved his troops into the territory the cession of which was claimed by the document. The Ameers accepted the treaty, but protested against its severity. The leading Ameer was a very old man, over eighty years of age, named Meer Roostum. Between him and his younger half-brother, Ali Moorad, lay a great gap of years—perhaps forty—and a still greater gap of hatred, for Alilonged to possess his elder brother's lands, rights, andpuggaree, as the turban, or insignia of paramount power, was called. Outram was anxious to save the Ameers from the total destruction which he knew must await them if arms were made the arbitrament of the dispute. Ali Moorad saw that only by a recourse to war could his scheme of ambition be gratified. Between them stood Napier, determined upon using to the utmost the immense power which the Viceroy had placed in his hands, and seeing far beyond the present dispute a time when this valley of the Indus must all become British territory; seeing it in imagination, too, a happy valley waving with grain, peopled by a peaceful and contented population free from the exactions of semi barbarian chiefs, and enjoying the blessings of a government which would rule them with patriarchal justice—a picture the reality of which no human eye has ever looked on.

But above and beyond all this there was another spring in Charles Napier's mind, more potent than any picture, more powerful than any prompting. Above everything else he was a soldier. The clash of arms was dear to him as music to the ear of an Italian. No lover ever longed for mistress more than did this man long for fighting. Was he bloodthirsty? Not in the least. His heart was tender as a child's, his sympathies were far-reaching as a woman's; but for all that every fibre of his nature vibrated to the magic touch of military glory, and his earthly paradise was the front rank of battle.

That his soldier nature was all this time in a state of antagonism with the other nature of pity and love of abstract justice cannot be doubted for a moment. Theconflict peeps out through hundreds of pages of his journals. How glad he would be if these Ameers would boldly reject the treaty and defy him! "I almost wish," he writes on December 5th, "that they proudly defied us and fought, for they are so weak, so humble, that punishing them goes against the grain." Most men who read his life to-day will echo that regret. All this while the unfortunate Ameers, divided by conflicting counsels, and distracted by the rumours of coming war which Ali Moorad industriously circulated among them, were drifting rapidly to ruin. The older men were for complete submission, the younger hands were advising resistance. The wild Beloochee matchlock men and the fierce horsemen of Scinde were clamorous not to allow the old fame of the Talpoors to die out in shameful surrender. The Feringhee, even when the treaty had been signed, would move on Hyderabad. The treasure of the Ameers was great, their harems were numerous. If they were doomed to lose all, better lose all with arms in their hands facing the invader. Such was the state of affairs during the month of December, 1842. The Ameers are irresolute and distracted by a thousand reports; Ali Moorad is deeply scheming to make Napier believe his relatives mean fighting; Outram, the Ameers' best friend, has been sent by Lord Ellenborough away from Scinde, and at Napier's request is about to return from Bombay; and Napier himself, dazzled with the realisation of his life-long dream of military glory, is about "to cut with the sword the Gordian knot" of Scindian politics. In the middle of the month of December he crossed his army from the right to the left bank of the Indus at Sukkur, and put his troops in column of route.The state of his mind at this moment is laid bare to us in his journal; on December 21st he writes thus:

Ten thousand fighting men and their followers are camped here at Alore, a town built by Alexander the Great. My tent overlooks this most beautiful encampment. The various sounds, the multitude of followers, the many costumes and languages, and the many religions, produce a strange scene which makes a man think, Why is all this? Why am I supreme? A little experience in the art of killing, of disobedience to Heaven's behests, is all the superiority that I, their commander, can boast of! How humbled thinking makes me feel! Still, I exult when beholding this force. I have worked my way to this great command, and am gratified at having it, yet despise myself for being so gratified! Yes, I despise myself, not as feeling unworthy to lead, for I am conscious of knowing how to lead, and my moral and physical courage are equal to the task; my contempt is for my worldliness. Am I not past sixty? Must I not soon be on the bed of death? And yet so weak as to care for these things. No, I do not. I pray to do what is right and just, and to have strength to say, 'Get thee behind me, Satan.' Alas, I have not the strength! Well, this comfort remains—with a secret and strong desire to guide in war, I have avoided it studiously!

At four o'clock in the morning following Christmas Day he put his troops in motion for the south. On the last night of the year he is encamped near Khyrpoor; to his right lies the level alluvial valley of the Indus, to his left the great desert of Scinde rolls away in measureless sand-waves. Walking in front of his tent and looking at the long line of camp fires, while the hum of his host floats up through the glorious Eastern night, he begins as it were to speak his thoughts aloud. All his plans are formed. "One night," he says, "I drank strong coffee and had a capitalthinkfor an hour.I got many matters decided in that hour." He will march first into the desert on his left and take the fort of Emanghur, a stronghold of the northern Ameers of high repute because it is an island in a waterless sea; then will come back to the Indus and direct his march upon Hyderabad. The Ameers will fly, he thinks, across the Indus, and the entire left bank of the river from the Punjaub to the sea will become British territory. If the Ameers elect to fight, well, he will be glad to give them every opportunity. "Peace and civilisation will then replace war and barbarism. My conscience will be light, for I see no wrong in so regulating a set of tyrants who are themselves invaders, and have in sixty years nearly destroyed the country. The people hate them. I may be wrong, but I cannot see it, and my conscience will not be troubled. I sleep well while trying to do this, and shall sleep sound when it is done." Here in these few words we have the picture of the invasion of Scinde as he then saw it. Nevertheless it was not the picture which India saw, which Outram saw, and which calm and impartial history must see to-day. And here let us look for a moment on the field of war, for war it was to be, that lay before this army camped under the winter starlight on this last night of 1842.

A vast dreary world was this Scinde. Men who knew it best called it the Unhappy Valley, and the name fitted accurately the nation. A flat, dusty, sun-scorched, fever-poisoned land; an Egypt turned the wrong way, and with a past so blurred and battered that no eye could read it; a changeless landscape of dusty distance through which the meanest habitations of men loomed at intervals, with ragged solitary acacia trees, and old brokenmosques and mounds that had once been cities, and towns that were always shrinking, and graveyards that were ever growing. In the centre of this Unhappy Valley rolled the Indus—a broad rapid river when the summer flood poured down its silt-sided channel, a lean shrunken stream when winter heaped high his snowflakes in the mountains of Afghanistan; and yet a rich land wherever water could be given to its thirsty surface. Man had only to scuffle and hoe the baked dust, pour water over it, and in a month or two the arid plain became a waving sea of emerald green, to quickly change again to a vast level of yellowing grain. But it is a strange fact that wherever these conditions of dusty desert turned green with animal inundation are found, there too you will find man a slave and a tyrant. Grades there may be between, but always the lowest layers of the human strata will be slaves, and the upper ones will be their owners. And nowhere was this rule more certain than in Scinde. The native Scindian who grubbed the earth, dug the canal, and turned the water-wheel, was a slave. The Beloochee, whether he called himself predatory hill-man, settled lord of the valley, or ruling Ameer, was a tyrant. What the Mameluke had been to Egypt the Beloochee was to Scinde—a ruling caste, fierce fighters, making free with every rule of their prophet, faithful only to his fanatic spirit. Three separate groups of rulers called Ameers governed Scinde. They all claimed equal descent from the Talpoor chief who, seventy years before this period, had come down from Beloochistan and conquered the Unhappy Valley. There were the Ameers of Lower Scinde, who dwelt in Hyderabad; those of Upper Scinde, whose headquarterswas Khyrpoor; and those of East Scinde, who ruled at Meerpoor. As their descent was equal, so their characters were alike. Prosperity and power and self-indulgence had taken the old Beloochee steel out of their natures. They drank, they feasted, they hunted, and they loved after the fashion of the East. That they were not so weak or so vicious as a thousand rulers of India lying farther south is clear, but it was only because they were nearer to the mountains from whose flinty rocks they had come three generations earlier. Everything that has ever descended from these grim northern hills has degenerated in India. The Arab fares no better than does his horse when once he passes those arid portals.

Such was the land and such the people with whom Napier was now to come to blows in the new year about to dawn. War had not been declared, but it was certain that some of the Ameers at least were gathering their Beloochee feudatories, that it was often stated in their durbars that the hot season, now near at hand, would paralyse the action of the English general, and that, as a bold and resolute front had ended in Afghanistan in the total withdrawal of the English armies, so might that most necessary adjunct to the string of diplomacy ensure the final retirement of the Feringhee from the territories of Scinde. Ever present in Napier's mind was this approaching hot season. Viewing the conduct of the principal Ameers through the glasses of his new friend and ally, Meer Ali Moorad, and seeing with his own eyes the evidence of their tyrannical rule over their subjects, he had resolved to anticipate all plans, to forestall all projects, to determine all events by marching at once upon the chief strongholds of the Ameers. Ifhis innate love of justice whispered to him any suggestion that the cause of quarrel was not clear, that the chief Ameers were divided among themselves, and that moderate counsels would prevail over their fears and their weakness, the spectacle of their tyranny and worthlessness, of Beloochee bloodthirstiness and Scindian slavery, was ever before his vision to shut out such misgivings. The government of the Ameers seemed in his eyes as monstrous and unjust as had the Irish government of his boyish days or the English administration of Castlereagh and Sidmouth, and all the pent torrent of his nature longed to go out and crush it. Love of glory, hatred of oppression, these two most potent factors in the story of his life, called him to the field; he forgot that it is possible to be unjust even to injustice, and that if there were no criminals there need be no mercy.

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