Sir Charles Napier

For eighteen months longer – until September, 1847 – Napier remained in Scinde, labouring to rule its people on the strictest lines of honest justice. Two more hot seasons scorched his now age-weakened frame, and again came terrible visitations of cholera and fever, to lay low many a gallant friend and make aching gaps in his own domestic circle; but these trials he accepted as a soldier accepts on the battle-field the bullets which whistle as they go, – for want of life. But there was one thing which he could not accept with the same courageous calmness: it was the systematic censure upon his actions, vilification of his motives, and abuse of himself, which deepened in intensity as the load of life grew heavier through age. When a traveller through tropical forests touches a hornets' nest the enraged insects rush out and sting him on the moment; but the hornets' nest which Napier had disturbed in India was not to be appeased by any sudden ebullition of its wrath. Much more slow and deadly was its method. He had dared to speak the honest truth that was in him about the greed and rapacity of London Directors, and the waste, the extravagance, and the luxury of their English servants in the East; he had committed that sin which power never pardons, the championing of the poor and oppressed against the rich and ruling ones of the earth. Now he had to pay the penalty, and from a thousand sources it was demanded at his hands. There was to be no mercy for this man who had not only dared to condemn the abuses of power, but had added the insult of smiting his opponents with the keen Damascus blade of his genius. To condemn plutocratic power has ever been bad enough, but to ridicule the truffle-fed and the truculent tyrant has been a thousand times worse. So for the closing years of his rule in Scinde, and indeed, one may say, almost up to the hour of his death, Napier had to bear slings and arrows that rained upon him from open and from unseen enemies. When the critic of to-day, scanning the pages of the now forgotten literature which deals with this long vituperative contest – sometimes carried on in Parliament, sometimes in the Press, often in books, official papers, and Minutes of Council – he cannot repress a feeling of regret that Napier should ever have noticed a tithe of the abuse and censure which was heaped upon him. Still we must remember that first of all he was a soldier, quick to strike when struck, never counting the cost of his blow against wrong or injustice or oppression of the poor; ever ready to turn his defence into assault, and to storm with brightest and keenest sword-blade the entrenchments of his assailants. One can picture, for instance, the dull rage of some of his ministerial antagonists in this year 1847, when after they had worried him with a thousand queries upon a variety of false accusations circulated by his enemies in Bombay as to his injurious treatment of the cultivators in Scinde, he takes particular pains to inform the Government in England that he can send them eleven thousand tons of wheat from the Indus to feed the then starving people of Ireland. Clearly this was an offence beyond pardon!

In October, 1847, Charles Napier quitted Scinde and set his face for England. He came back broken in health but absolutely unbent in spirit. How full he is of great thoughts – of conquests which should benefit humanity; of freedom which would strike down monopoly and privilege and tyranny; of reform which would not stop short until it had reached the lowest depths of the social system. "Were I Emperor of the East and thirty years of age," he writes, "I would have Constantinople on one side and Pekin on the other before twenty years, and all between should be grand, free, and happy. The Emperor of Russia should be done; freedom and the Press should burn along his frontier like touch-paper until half his subjects were mine in heart." Then he turns to Ireland. To be dictator of that country "would be worth living for." The heads of his system of rule are worth recalling to-day, though they are more than forty years old. First of all he would send "the whole of the bishops and deacons of the Church as by law established to New Zealand, there to eat or to be eaten by cannibals." Then the tillers of the soil should be made secure, a wise system of agriculture taught and enforced, all uncultivated land taxed; then he would hang the editors of noisy newspapers, fire on the mob if it rose against him, and hang its leaders, particularly if they were Catholic priests. But it is very worthy of remark that his drastic measures would not be taken until all other efforts at reform had failed. Poor-law commissioners would have to work on the public roads and all clearers of land be summarily hanged without benefit of clergy. Beneath this serio-comic exposition of Irish government one or two facts are very noticeable. The bishops who had revenue without flocks, and the landlords who wished to have flocks instead of tenants, were given highest place in the penal pillory; after them came the Irish priests and people.

In May, 1848, Napier reached England. He had spent the winter in the Mediterranean, as it was feared his health could ill stand the sudden change from Scinde to an English December. But while loitering by the shores of the sunny sea he is not idle; despite illness and bodily pain his mind is busy recalling the past or forecasting the future. The anniversaries of his Scindian battles call forth the remark, "I would rather have finished the roads in Cephalonia than have fought Austerlitz or Waterloo."

Europe, then seething in the fever fit which threw from her system a good deal of the poison placed in it by the Congress of Vienna, is scanned by the veteran soldier with an eye that gleams again with the old fire at the final triumph of those principles of human right which he had in earlier days loved as a man, though compelled to combat as a soldier. Had we not interfered in the affairs of France there would have been no "'48 Revolution," he writes; "Louis Philippe would have been what nature fitted him for – a pedlar."

When he arrived in England an attempt was made by a small but powerful clique to boycott him, but the people broke the barrier of this wretched enmity, and he was soon taken to the great heart of the nation he had served so well. Amid all the addresses, the dinners, and the congratulations, there comes a little touch that tells us the conqueror's heart is still true to the conscript's love. A Radical shoemaker in Bath has written to welcome home the victor. "I am more flattered by Bolwell's letter," replies the veteran, "than by dinners from all the clubs in London." Many natures stand firm under the rain of adversity, for she is an old and withered hag; only the real hero resists the smiles of success, for she comes hiding the thorn under rosy cheeks and laughing lips.

CHAPTER XII

ENGLAND – 1848 TO 1849

From May, 1848, to March, 1849, Napier remained in England. During these ten months his life might fitly be described as a mixture of honour and insult – honour from the great mass of his fellow-countrymen, insult at the hands of the Board of Directors of the East India Company, and from more than one Minister of the Crown. While the military clubs in London and corporate bodies throughout England and Ireland were organising banquets in his honour, the Directors were busily at work depreciating his fame as a soldier, and endeavouring to deprive him of the prize-money taken in the Scinde War; and for the same purpose the cause of the ex-Ameers of Scinde was brought forward and championed by the very persons who at this moment were defending and endeavouring to screen the perfidy recently enacted against the Rajah of Sattara in the interests of the East India Directors.

That Charles Napier resented with exceeding warmth these insults upon his honour and attacks upon his fortune is not matter of surprise, at least to those who have watched his career through all its varying vicissitudes, nor were the times such as would have tended to soothe into quieter temper a mind easily set aflame by the sight of suffering and oppression. This summer of 1848 was indeed a painful period. The shadow of an appalling famine was still passing over Ireland; seven hundred and fifty thousand peasants had already perished from starvation, and the ghastly record was being hourly swelled by fresh victims. From across the Atlantic terrible accounts were arriving of the horrors of the "coffin ships," wherein the famine-wasted refugees perished in such numbers and amid such scenes of human suffering that the records of the old middle passage of the slave-ships from Africa were paralleled if not surpassed. Nor did the story of suffering end when the great gate of refuge, the shore of America, was reached, for the deadly famine fever clung to those who reached the land, and the New World saw repeated in the pest-houses at Quebec, Montreal, Boston, New York, the same awful scenes which Defoe had described nearly two hundred years earlier. Small wonder then if Napier's nature should have flared out at such a time. "I see that violence and 'putting down' is the cry," he writes. "There is but one way of putting down starving men who take arms – killing them; and one way of hindering them from taking up arms, viz. feeding them. The first seems to engross the thoughts of all who wear broadcloth and gorge on turbot, but there seems no great measure in view for removing suffering," and then comes a reflection that has a strange interest for us to-day: "Yet God knows what will happen, for we see great events often turn out the reverse of what human calculations lead us to expect."

When the summer of 1848 was closing, Napier took a house at Cheltenham for the winter, glad to escape from "those effusions of fish and folly," the London dinners. From here he watched as eagerly as though he had been fifty years younger the progress of events in Northern India, where already all his forecasts of renewed strife were being rapidly realised. Mooltan was up, the Sikhs were again in arms, the true nature of the battles on the Sutlej were made apparent; and those hard-bought victories which the East India Directors and their allies, ignorant of every principle of war, had persisted in blazoning to the world as masterpieces of strategy and tactics, were seen to possess, certainly, the maximum of soldier's courage, but by no means that of general's ability. The Punjaub war had in fact to be fought again. Meanwhile the lesser war between Napier and the Directors went briskly on. The more decidedly events in the East justified the acts and opinions of Napier, the more vehement became the secret hostility against him. Secret warfare formed no part of the Napier tactics, and accordingly we find him blazing out in open warfare against his sly and circumspect traducers. Writing in his journal more than a year before this date, he had foreshadowed for himself the line he would adopt against his adversaries. "There is a vile conspiracy against me," he wrote, "but I defy them all, horse, foot, and dragoons. Now, Charles Napier, be calm! give your enemies no advantage over you by loss of self-control; do nothing that they want, and everything to annoy them; keep your post like a rock, till you are ready to go on board for England; and then with your pen, and your pistols too, if necessary, harass them." Here was his plan of campaign, sketched out clearly enough, plenty of fire and steel in it, no concealment. "The Gauls march openly to battle," had written a Roman historian eighteen hundred years earlier. When the Franks crossed the Rhine they came to graft upon the Gaulish nature a still fairer and franker mode of action. Charles Napier could trace his pedigree back to frankest Frank, and whether he fought a Frenchman in Spain, a Beloochee in Scinde, or an East Indian trader in the city of London, his methods of battle were the same.

Before the year '48 closed, great changes and events had taken place over Europe. France had shaken off her old man of the mountain, Italy was giving many premonitory signs of getting rid of the Austrian, that sinister settlement called the Congress of Vienna was everywhere being undone. Even in Ireland the ferment of revolution was causing a spasmodic twitching in that all but lifeless frame, and desperate men, forgetful of the utter ruin which must await their efforts at revolt, were about to add the final misery of war to the already deeply-tasted evils of famine and pestilence.

And now came an episode of the Irish rising which was closely connected with Charles Napier. In September the leaders of the movement were brought to trial in Clonmel. Sir William Napier, who for the past six years had devoted himself to the task of vindicating his brother's character and actions from the aspersions and assaults of his numerous enemies, had in 1832 been the recipient of a letter, written by the private secretary of a Cabinet Minister, of a very strange nature. No other interpretation could have been justly placed upon this communication except that it was an attempt to sound the then Colonel Napier upon the likelihood of his consenting to lead an armed movement of men from Birmingham to London. Wild though such a project may now appear, there can be no doubt that at the time of the great Reform Bill it was by no means looked upon as lying outside the pale of probability. The news that the Duke of Wellington was about to form an anti-reform administration was received by the people of England with a deep feeling of execration, and resistance was openly proposed and advocated. "To run upon the banks for gold, and to pay no taxes to the State, until reform was granted," were only the preliminary steps which the Whig leaders advised the people to adopt; and it was an open secret that Lord John Russell was prepared to go much further in his scheme of resistance to law in the struggle which the violent opposition of the Lords was forcing upon the nation. It was therefore no stretch of Colonel Napier's imagination to see in the strange letter which he received from the Whig Minister's private secretary a scarcely veiled invitation to draw his sword against what was the existing law of the land. Bad though that law most certainly was, and vehemently though he had opposed it by voice and pen and labour of mind and body, William Napier was still the last man in England to pass the boundary which separates moral from physical antagonism. It is alike the misfortune of thrones and of peoples that around the former there will ever crowd those selfish and self-seeking men whose loyalty is only a cover to hide their own greed of power or possession. These people are the real enemies of kings, for they doubly darken the view which the monarch gets of his people and that which the people get of their king. The Napiers had both been near enough to the Throne to know that it lay a long way beyond the self-seeking crowd which surrounded it, and their hatred of that crowd and of its politics did not go an inch beyond the surrounding circle. To draw his sword against the faction which then stood between the people and their right of reform must be to advance against the Crown, which this faction had cunningly contrived to hang as a breastplate upon their bodies. That fact was sufficient for William Napier, and he not only repudiated the suggestion with all the strength of his nature, but he warned his correspondent that if ever the then leaders of reform should become the dominant faction in the State, and should attempt to play upon the people the same selfish game of obstruction or to prosecute others for resorting to similar methods of force, he, William Napier, would not hesitate to publish to the world the unscrupulous lengths to which those leaders were now prepared to carry their efforts. The trial of the leaders of the Irish physical-force party at Clonmel on a charge of high treason seemed to Sir William to be just the occasion he had threatened his correspondent with. That he held the letter we have described had long been an open secret, and it was therefore no wonder that he was summoned by the counsel conducting the prisoners' defence. Early in October, 1848, the appearance of this majestic veteran as a witness at the trial of Mr. Smith O'Brien fluttered the Whig dovecots from one end of the kingdom to the other. Of course there was the usual howl of execration from the whole tribe of self-styled loyalists, office-holders, highly-paid idlers, and others; but nevertheless William Napier was perfectly true to all the noble traditions of his race and his life in this action of his in behalf of a man who, though terribly mistaken in the line he had adopted, had been given only too much excuse for despairing of remedying the wrongs and miseries of his countrymen by any method of constitutional action.

It happened that in the same month which witnessed these proceedings in Clonmel a large public banquet was given to Charles Napier by the citizens of Dublin, and it was of course impossible that the action taken by one brother in opposition to the Whig Government should not have been made an occasion for trying to injure, if not prevent, the compliment about to be paid to the other brother in Dublin. Nothing could have been meaner and more ignoble than this attempt to step between the citizens of Dublin and the old soldier whom they wished to honour. The attempt failed, as it deserved to fail. The banquet was a splendid ovation. It was followed by another dinner at Limerick, where the entire people united to honour the guest of the citizens. During his stay in the Irish capital Napier visited the Theatre-Royal, and the whole house rose and gave him an enthusiastic welcome when he appeared at the front of the box. The heart of the man seemed deeply touched by these evidences of affection from the Irish people. "If I loved Ireland before, gratitude makes me love her more now," he writes. "My father and mother seemed to rise before my eyes to witness the feelings of Dublin towards me." This was indeed fame. Exactly fifty years earlier he had left the old city of Limerick to ride off to his life of war and wounds and wanderings, and through all the long intervening years he had never forgotten the land or the people of his boyhood. Now he was repaid. These ringing cheers and looks of welcome were the fittest answer to the impotent spleen of men in power who had denied him the just recognition of his labours and his victories. They had showered peerages and baronetcies upon the heads of the leaders of the incomplete Punjaub campaign. On the victor of Scinde only the most trifling rewards had been bestowed, and now the people, always just in their final verdict, had reversed the award.

Napier went for the last time to Celbridge. How strange it seems to him! How dwarfed it all is by the mighty battles through which the path of life has led him! The old scenes are there – the river, with its overhanging trees; the green fields, the fences, the terrace; the house where every window and door and wall holds some separate memory; the blue hill-tops along the southern horizon that used to be leagues distant, but now look close at hand, as though they had one and all shrunken in size. And so they have; because in after-life we look at each scene across many mounds, and a hundred beloved figures and faces of childhood rise up from the grave to dim our sight with tears.

Back to Cheltenham again to the war against Directors and their confederates, and to other work too. There are many veterans "wearing out the thread" in the town, and they love to come to the old hero and retail their woes to him. No sending out of a shilling to the door by footman or valet, but a talk over old times, and kind words as well as money to these old, worn-out stop-bullets. "Poor old fellows," he writes, "it vexes me to see them so hard run for small comforts, and I am glad I came here, if it were only for the chats with them of old fights and hardships. They like this, but complain bitterly that old officers take no notice of them. When I see these shrivelled old men with age ploughed deep in their wrinkled old faces like my own, and remember the deeds they did with the bayonet, I sigh for ancient days when our bodies were fit for war. I remember these men powerful and daring in battle, for they are mostly my own soldiers." With Napier there was no such thing as a "common soldier"; the man who went out and fought and marched and toiled was a hero – a private soldier hero if you will, but a hero all the same. The whole gorge of the man rose at the thought that the men who had bled for England should die in an English poorhouse; that there were thousands and tens of thousands who rolled in carriages, and drew dividends, and made long speeches in Parliament, and ate truffles and turtle, because these wizened old scarecrows had in days gone by charged home, or stood like stone walls under murderous storms of grape and musketry, or climbed some slippery breach amid the mangled bodies of their comrades.

A great victory over his numerous and powerful enemies at home was now in store for Charles Napier. Suddenly, while they were in the midst of their cabals and intrigues – pulling the thousand strings of mendacity which gold has ever at its disposal – the crash of disaster to our arms in India struck panic into the Directors and the Government. The Khalsa leader, Sheere Singh, had declared war in the northern Punjaub, and the Dhurum-Kha-Klosa, or religious war-drum of the Sikhs, was beating from Peshawur to the Chenaub. The Indian Government affected to treat this new Punjaub war as a trifling revolt. The price paid in life and treasure for the war that had ended not three years earlier had been so heavy, and the rewards given to the victors were so great, that this striking proof of incompleteness had to be minimised as much as possible. It was really nothing. Nobody need be alarmed. The Commander-in-Chief in India, Lord Gough, had ample force at his command to crush this partial uprising of the remnant of the Khalsa army. So said and wrote the Directors, and so said and wrote the many echoing speakers and scribes who enjoyed their patronage. All this went on during the early winter of 1848. Lord Gough, a brave and distinguished veteran of that type of soldier whose straight and simple code of honour made him unfitted to deal with the inherent mendacity of the Directorate, felt himself obliged to act up to the picture so plausibly painted by his civil superiors. They said he had sufficient force, and that the enemy was to be despised. In honour bound he must prove these statements to be true. The old fire-eater forgot that he was risking his army and his reputation for men who would be false to him at the slightest breath of adversity, and would unhesitatingly cast him overboard if by doing so they could prolong for even an hour their own truculent power. Gough advanced from an ill-stored base upon the enemy. After a most unfortunate encounter between our advanced troops and the Sikhs at Ramnugger, the English general crossed the Chenaub, and engaged the whole Khalsa army at Chillianwallah, on January 13th, 1849. In this memorable encounter disaster followed upon error, until night stopped the fighting. Infantry were moved up in close formation to masked batteries, no reconnaissance had been carried out, the positions of the Sikh army had to be found by the lines advancing to storm them, and the troops were formed up to fight their enemy after a long and fatiguing day's march when they should have been lying asleep in camp. When daylight dawned upon this scene of the confused fight of the previous evening, it was found that the Sikhs had fallen back, but we had lost above two thousand men, half of whom were Europeans; four guns and six standards had also been taken from us. British soldiers will fight their leaders through many scrapes and mistakes, but Chillianwallah had been too prolific in error to be saved even by heroism. When the news of this battle reached England, the entire nation cried out with one voice for Charles Napier at the helm of India, and of all the bitter draughts ever swallowed by any Honourable Company of Traders assuredly the bitterest was this forced acceptance as their Commander-in-Chief of the man whom now for six years they had been assailing in public and in private throughout the entire English empire. All honest England laughed loud at their discomfiture. Every real man welcomed with joy the triumph of the old hero over his treacherous and powerful foes. But a week before the news of this disaster Napier had been holding his own with difficulty against the enmity of Ministers, Directors, and the leading organs of the Press. The most persistent efforts had been made to confiscate his prize-money and to destroy his military reputation. Only a month earlier he had written to his brother, "I have always an idea of what you expect, viz. the Directors trumping up some accusation against me, but they can do nothing, because I have done nothing wrong." With all his knowledge of character he was still ignorant of the limits to which the hatred of a corporate body can extend. When Charles Napier was sent for by the Duke of Wellington, and offered, by order of the Queen, the command in India, that laconic but celebrated conversation took place. "If you don't go, I must," had said the Duke. There could only be one answer to this, and when next day the Press announced that Napier was to proceed at once to India as Commander-in-Chief, the whole voice of England ratified the appointment.

But the most striking moment of triumph had still to come. It was usual for the Directors of the Company to give a banquet to the man who was about to leave England to command the royal and the native armies. Napier accepted the invitation. The hatchet was to be buried. Salt was to be eaten. The old Duke was present. Some of the Ministers were there, but others were noticeable by their absence. It was a moment when a smaller mind than Napier's might easily have allowed itself the exultation of victory, but the old soldier spoke without trace of triumph. "I go to India," he said, "at the command of Her Majesty, by the recommendation of the Duke of Wellington, and I believe I go also with the approbation of my countrymen;" and then, without deigning to speak of the past and its contrast with the moment, he quietly observed, "Least said is soonest mended," thanked his hosts for their hospitality, and sat down.

Then there came a short and busy interval, in which what is called "the world" ran mad after the hero, not, indeed, because any more of a hero than he had been a month or a year or twenty years before, but simply because "the world" thought he could do it a good turn in the matter of its brothers and sons and nephews. The redoubtable "Dowb" had to be "taken care of" all along the line, and who can take care of him better than a Commander-in-Chief in India? One little item from that time should not be forgotten by those who want to know what manner of man this Charles Napier was. Just before starting for the East a sudden command reached him summoning him to dine at Osborne. He has no Court dress. There is a yellow or drab waistcoat, however, of old-world fashion and finery upon which he has set store for years. What could be nicer than this garment? They tell him that it is somewhat out of date – that it is too high in the collar or too long in the body; in fact, that it won't do. What is to be done? Only this. He has a valet – Nicholas by name, Frenchman and dandy – and this valet has a very fine waistcoat. So the waistcoat of Nicholas is produced, and off to the Isle of Wight goes the Commander-in-Chief to kiss the hand of the sovereign he has served so well. No man is a hero to his valet, says the proverb. We cannot say what Nicholas thought of his master; but this we can say, that among many soldier hearts throbbing for their Queen, Her Majesty had none more truly heroic than the old one that beat that day beneath the valet's waistcoat.

CHAPTER XIII

COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF IN INDIA

To India again, sixty-seven years old, and frequently suffering physical pain such as few men can know. Only a month before sailing he had thus described his sensations. "The injured nerves [of the face] carry inflammation up to the brain and it is not to be borne. I cannot tell what others may suffer, but they have not had the causes that affect me to affect them; they have not had the nerves torn by a jagged ball passing through, breaking nose-bones and jaw-bones, and lacerating nerves, muscles, and mucous membranes; they can hardly therefore have suffered as I do; if they have, their fortitude is beyond mine, for I cannot bear even the thought of it. It makes every nerve in my body tremble, even now, from writing on the subject."

On May 6th, 1849, Napier landed at Calcutta to find the Sikh War over. Lord Gough had completely vanquished the Khalsa arms at Goojerat, and resistance ceased from that day. Though perhaps in one sense this was a disappointment to Napier, he rejoiced that a fine old soldier should have been able by this victory to vindicate his military reputation. "It was hard," he writes, "that a brave old veteran like Gough, whose whole life has been devoted to his duty, should be dismissed from his command and close his long career under undeserved abuse, because the Directors kept him in a post that had become too difficult." But though actual hostilities had ceased there was work enough in India for a score of Commanders-in-Chief to set right. From top to bottom the whole administrative and executive system of the Indian army was wrong, and what was worse, was wrong from such a multiplicity of great and small causes that any attempt to set it right might well have appeared hopeless to the best administrative head ever set on the most vigorous body. There was no single point or no half-dozen points upon which the attempt at reform could be begun. It was not a passing distemper of the military body. It was dry rot and organic disease showing itself outwardly, indeed, in numerous symptoms of insubordination and lack of discipline; but the roots of which nothing but a gigantic incision could reach.

Leaving Calcutta in the end of May and proceeding by the slow methods of travel then in vogue, the new Commander-in-Chief reached Simla late in June. Here he met the Governor-General, Lord Dalhousie, and here in a few weeks began those strifes and contentions which eventually broke the old soldier's heart. Although the subjects of contention between the Commander-in-Chief and the Governor-General were many, and although all interest in them individually has long since evaporated in time, they still form, when viewed collectively in the light of the ever-to-be-remembered catastrophe of 1857, by far the most momentous reading that can be presented to-day to the statesman or the student of our empire. For the issue fought out by this soldier Chief and this civil Governor is yet before the nation, and some day or other will have to be decided, even in larger lists than that which witnessed its first great test in the Indian Mutiny of 1857.

War in a nation resembles a long and wasting disease in a human subject. It has a period of convalescence, when all the weak points of the system seem to threaten destruction even when the fever has passed. So it was in India now. Ever since 1838 war had been going on in India or close beyond its frontier. The Sikh War of 1849 ended the long catalogue, was in fact the last gust of the Afghan storm; but every administrative evil, civil and military, now lay exposed upon the weakened frame, and Napier's quick eye, long trained in the experience of Scinde, read almost at a glance the dangerous symptoms. Resolutely he bent himself to the thankless task of reform. He was Commander-in-Chief of a great army, but an army which had gone wholly wrong from the evil system which had crept into it from a hundred sources. He would trace out these sources of evil, cure them or cut them out, and leave India a record of his rule as Commander-in-Chief which would be of greater service to her than if he had led this army to the most brilliant victory. Such, in a few words, was the purpose he set himself to work for from the moment he set foot in India, and found that his task was not to be one of war.

Shortly after his arrival in Simla he began again to keep a journal, and in its pages we see, as in a mirror, the source of every outward act of his life traced out through every thought. In that journal the whole story of his effort and his failure, of the endless communings with those two great counsellors whom he long before declared should be the only prompters a man of action should have, "his conscience and his pillow," and of the difficulties and obstacles that met him at every step, is set forth. Here at Simla he sits, thinking and writing, collecting reports, reading despatches from every part of India, and writing down a vast mass of advice and recommendation, of warning and forecast, which, seven years later, are to seem like the prophecies of some inspired seer.

"The clouds are below us," he writes to his sister, "flying in all directions; and oftentimes, as one sits in a room, a cloud walks in as unconcernedly as a Christian, and then melts away." So, too, below him lay the thousand clouds of selfish struggle and petty contention which for ever seem to hover over our government of India; but, alas! when these clouds came up to Simla they did not melt away, but settled in a thickening gloom between him and the goal he strove so hard to reach. "I am working fifteen hours a day at my desk," he writes again, "working myself to death here; and what fame awaits me? None! I work because it is honest to earn my pay; but work is disagreeable in the extreme – hateful. Were I to remain five years I might do some good to this noble army; but for the short time I am to be here nothing can be done – at least nothing worth the loss of health and happiness. Never, however, did I know either, except when working in a garden or in Cephalonia making roads and doing good." And now, it may be asked by some persons, what were the reforms which this man endeavoured to effect? Why did he not leave well alone? Forty years have passed since Charles Napier "worked himself to death" at Simla, striving to set right the army and the military administration of India. He was thwarted in his labours, ridiculed for his fears, censured for his measures of reform. The men who opposed him became the petted favourites of his enemies. His own friends were marked out for enmity or neglect. He resigned. Time passed. The old soldier sank into his grave, and the hatred of his detractors did not ease its slander even when the tomb had closed upon the hero. Seven years went by, and suddenly the storm he had so vainly foretold broke upon India and upon England. The native army of Bengal mutinied. India ran with blood. Men, women, and children perished in thousands. Massacre and ruin overspread the land. Fortunately the blow fell when the nation, at peace with the great powers of the world, was able to concentrate all her energies upon India. But the struggle was a life-and-death one, and had Bombay and Madras followed the lead of Bengal, all was over. "Yes," I think I hear some one say, "but did not the Bengal army rise in revolt because greased cartridges were given to them with a new rifle?" My friend, the greased cartridge had to say to the Indian Mutiny just what pulling the trigger of a gun has to say to the loading of the charge. Long before ever a greased cartridge was heard of, the big gun of India had been loaded and rammed and primed and made ready to go off at the first hair-trigger's excuse it could find; and it was this loading and priming that Charles Napier was doing his utmost to draw from the gun during his tenure of Commander-in-Chiefship, and it was this loading and priming that his opponents were filling further and ramming harder by their ignorant opposition to him.

When the cool season begins, the Commander-in-Chief sets out upon his tour of inspection. How different it is from the triumphal progress heretofore usual! "What does an officer want in the field?" he had written shortly before leaving England; "his bed, his tent, a blanket, a second pair of breeches, a second pair of shoes, half a dozen shirts, a second flannel waistcoat, a couple of towels, and a piece of soap; all beyond is mere luxury, and not fit for a campaign." So, too, when the Commander-in-Chief was seen on his tour with diminished elephants and fewer camels and no bullocks, and only a third of the usual number of tent-pitchers and half the force or establishment of chupprassees and absolutely no doolie-wallahs at all, old Indians looked mutely at each other in speechless deprecation of such enormities. Then a thousand stories were circulated against the innovator. "He only gave claret at dinner to his guests; his tent was not big enough to swing a cat in; and because he had reduced the government bheesties (water-carriers) by half, it was clear he did not wash," etc., etc. But notwithstanding these criticisms and censures, the Commander-in-Chief went on from station to station, and never was examination so keen or inspection so close. Nothing escaped the eye that looked through these big spectacles. He is out at earliest dawn looking into matters in a regimental cantonment as closely as though he had been quartermaster-sergeant. One morning in some cantonment they miss him; he is not in the barracks nor on the parade-ground. The colonel gets nervous. "Go," he says to the adjutant, "go to the sergeant-major on the parade, and ask him if he has seen the Commander-in-Chief." But the sergeant-major is also missing; he is not on the parade. "Then ride over to his quarters and see if he is there." They go over to the staff-sergeant's quarters, and there sure enough is the missing sergeant-major, having a cup of tea and a bit of bread inside with a stranger. The nervous colonel becomes irate. The sergeant-major has no right to be in his quarters at such a critical time, when the most hawk-eyed Commander-in-Chief that ever held office is prowling about. "What are you doing in your quarters, sergeant-major?" – "The Commander-in-Chief is having some ration-bread and commissariat tea inside, sir," replies the sergeant-major, with a twinkle in his austere eye. And now out comes the missing Commander, face to face with the much-perplexed and puffed colonel. There is lightning in the eye behind the glasses. "And this is the bread your men are getting, sir," he says, holding out a half-eaten crust. "No wonder you have half your regiment in hospital."

At another station there is a young officer under arrest, awaiting the decision of the Commander-in-Chief upon his court-martial. He has been tried on a charge of having forgotten the respect due to his captain on a certain delicate occasion. The proofs were painfully clear; the young man had been convicted and sentenced to be cashiered. But there were many mitigating circumstances in the case; the officer was very young, and there was ample reason for supposing that the fruit he had stolen had not required much shaking. The Commander-in-Chief read the case carefully. "Sentence quashed," he wrote on the margin. "History records but one Joseph; this officer will return to his duty." These things, however, were but the play-moments of his progress; very serious matters soon claimed attention. In July, 1849, symptoms of mutiny began to manifest themselves in at least two regiments of Bengal Native Infantry stationed in the Punjaub. In November certain corps ordered to proceed to the Punjaub from Delhi openly showed insubordination. In December still graver signs of revolt occurred. The Thirty-Second Bengal Native Infantry refused to accept their pay, and mutinously demanded increased rates. The presence of a veteran general officer quelled this outbreak at Wuzzerabad, but a still more serious instance of insubordination was soon to manifest itself. In February, 1850, the Sixty-Sixth Regiment of Bengal Infantry broke into open mutiny at Govind Ghur, a suburb of Umritsur the sacred city of the Sikhs. The mutineers endeavoured to seize the fort, containing vast stores of arms and a large amount of treasure and ammunition. Again the vigorous action of an officer saved the gates, and a European regiment arriving in the nick of time overawed the rebellious Bengalees.

All these signs and portents of trouble were not lost upon the Commander-in-Chief; his resolution was quickly taken. By a stroke of the pen he disbanded the mutinous regiment, and put in its place a battalion of Ghoorka troops. The Governor-General was absent on a sea-voyage for the benefit of his health when this last alarming outbreak occurred at Umritsur. The case was urgent, the danger pressing. Twenty-four other Bengal regiments stationed in the Punjaub were known to be in close sympathy with the Sixty-Sixth; if the insubordination spread, the Sikh fires of resistance so lately quenched at Goojerat would again burst into flame. Gholab Singh was ready in Cashmere with a well-filled treasury and a large army to join the conflagration. The very existence of our Indian rule stood in peril. Napier was not the man to waste precious moments at such a crisis in seeking for precedents or covering his actions with the sanction of higher authority obtained by delay. He took three important steps.

Rightly judging that at such a moment any reduction of pay below the existing standard would give the discontent of the native troops a tangible and certain line of resistance, he directed that the promulgation of an order of the supreme Government, which would reduce the sepoys' allowances for rations below the standard then existing, and which had been originally framed chiefly to save the clerks in Calcutta trouble in their official documents, should be suspended, pending the result of a reference which would be made to the supreme Government on the subject. He next struck a crushing blow at the actual offenders in mutiny, by summarily disbanding the rebellious corps. And lastly he struck another vital blow at the entire Brahmin spirit of revolt, by enlisting Ghoorkas and putting them in the vacant places of the Bengalees, giving the new Ghoorka battalion the colours and number of the disbanded regiment.

Reviewing these lines of action now – even without the terrible after-light of the great Mutiny to guide our decision – it would be difficult for any sane man to find aught in them but ground for unqualified approval. They contain, indeed, such manifest evidences of sense and reason, that the man would appear to be bereft of the most elementary common sense who could find fault with them; and yet, incredible though it may well appear, not only was censure passed upon Napier for his action in this matter, but it was conveyed in such a rough and overbearing manner that the old soldier deemed it inconsistent with his honour to serve longer under such "shop-keeping" superiors. No other word can so fitly express the mental calibre of the men whose censure drove Charles Napier from the Indian command, and it is here used in a sense quite different from the usual caste acceptation of the term. The soldier and the shop-keeper must ever remain at opposite poles of thought. At their best, one goes out to fight for his country, and if necessary to die for it; the other remains at home to live, and to live well by it. At their worst, one acquires by force from the enemy, the other absorbs by fraud from his friends. But between the best and the worst there is a vast class of mental shop-keeping people who, although they do not keep any shops, are nevertheless always behind the counter, always asking themselves, "Will it pay?" always totting up a mental ledger, in which there is no double entry but only a single one of self. Nothing would be more delusive than to imagine this great class had any fixed limits of caste, rank, or profession. It may have been so once; it is not so now, nor has it been so for many generations. It reaches very high up the ladder now. It has titles, estates, coats-of-arms, moors, mountains, and the rest of it. It can be very prominent in both Houses of Parliament. But there is one thing it can never be, and that thing is a true soldier.

It can wear uniform and rise to high military rank, and have thousands of men serving under it, but for all that, we repeat, it can never be a real soldier – and the reason is simple, nowhere to be found more straightly stated than by a very deep thinker of our own time, who says: "I find this more and more true every day, that an infinitude of tenderness is the chief gift of all truly great men. It is sure to involve a relative intensity of disdain towards base things, and an appearance of sternness and arrogance in the eyes of all hard, stupid, and vulgar people, quite terrific to such if they are capable of terror, and hateful to them if they are capable of nothing higher than hatred." There we have the whole story of Napier and his antagonists. There we have the explanation of what Balzac meant when he wrote, "There is nothing so terrible as the vengeance of the shop-keeper." Throughout more than forty years of his fighting life, Charles Napier was exposed to that hatred and that vengeance. It could not have been otherwise. To be hated is often the price the hero must pay in life for the love his name is to gather round it after death.

One little gleam of soldier service came to brighten these last months of so-called command in India. It was an expedition through the Kohat Pass on the northern frontier. The tribe of Afridees, incensed at an order of the Civil Government stopping their supply of salt, had risen, massacred a detachment of soldiers, and occupied the pass, cutting off the station of Kohat. Three days after the news of the disaster to the troops reached Napier, he had organised his column and was in march for Kohat. He fought his way through the pass, relieved the post, and fought his way back again. It was the last flicker of the flame which had begun forty-one years before in the march to Corunna. The last fighting item in the journal is suggestive of many thoughts. A young ensign had been shot in the pass, another officer was mortally wounded; forty years of war and death in the battlefield had not dulled the "infinitude of tenderness" in the old soldier's heart. "My God," he writes, "how hateful is war! yet better die gloriously like young Sitwell than as my dear John did in the agonies of cholera"; then recollecting that the true soldier has no more right to pick and choose the manner of his death than he has to pick and choose the manner of his life, he goes on: "Fool that I am, to think Sitwell's death the best! We know nothing. How can I know anything about it? It was the impulse of a fool to think one death better than another. Prepare to die bravely, and let death come in whatever form it pleases God to send him." So closes the military record. A little later he wrote again: "I shall now go to Oaklands [his home in Hampshire], and look at my father's sword, and think of the day he gave it into my young hands, and of the motto on a Spanish blade he had, 'Draw me not without cause; put me not up without honour.' I have not drawn his sword without cause, nor put it up without honour."

Charles Napier returned from his last fight at Kohat to find the reprimand of the Indian Government awaiting him. He at once resigned. He was quite prepared to stifle his personal feelings in the matter, but the sense of his powerlessness to remedy the evil he so plainly saw decided him. He would no longer remain accountable to the country for disaster he was helpless to prevent, exposed to a hundred secret shafts of his antagonists, and certain to find his old enemies, the Directors of Leadenhall Street, bitterly hostile to him, except when danger menaced their ill-gotten possession. He remembered also that fifty-two years earlier he had seen "that great and good soldier, Sir Ralph Abercrombie, resign command in Ireland because he could not agree with the civil government." Yes, he would resign. The Hampshire home looked pleasant from afar. What memories, what perfumes these garden-walks have for the tired toiler in life! What violet so sweet, what rose so thornless as those we see, looking back to some garden that has been, looking forward to one that can never be! Although Napier resigned his command in April he did not leave India until the following spring, having to await the arrival of his successor. The intervening months were not idly spent. To the latest moment of his stay he laboured to improve the army he loved so well, to instil into the officer higher ideals of duty and nobler purpose of life, and to improve the condition of the man in the ranks, who to him was now, as always, never "a common soldier." Feeling certain that the dreadful mortality then existing among the European troops in India resulted solely from the wretched barrack accommodation which the parsimony of the Government would only allow, he laboured incessantly to shame the Administration into more liberal and humane concession. Yet in this noble effort he was constantly thwarted. The height of his barrack-rooms was reduced, the materials for construction lessened. In vain he showed that sufficient cubic space meant thousands of lives annually saved, that height of the sleeping-rooms above the ground meant freedom from fevers and dysenteries. The various Boards of Control and clerks in Calcutta were not to be moved by such considerations. Terrible examples were before these various Boards and Directorates, but still they were not to be convinced. After the battles of the Sutlej the remains of a splendid regiment, the Fiftieth, were sent to occupy one of these ill-built death-traps at Loodiana. In one fell night the entire building collapsed, and three hundred men, women, and children perished in the ruins. Of course it was nobody's fault. The regulations had been strictly adhered to – and does not everybody know that regulation is infallible? Did they not once let a king of Spain burn to death in his palace because the regulation extinguisher of royal fires was not present at the conflagration?

In the autumn of 185 °Charles Napier set out on the homeward journey. The last scenes in India were pleasant to the old soldier about to close his long and eventful career. He reviews once more his own favourite Twenty-Second Regiment and presents them with new colours. The soldiers of Meanee and Hyderabad received their chief with a frantic enthusiasm and delight that more than made amends for the neglect of the great and powerful; and the entire army too, whose deep heart the follies and the fashions of the moment cannot reach, bent its head as the old hero passed; and whatever was honest and independent and noble – and there was plenty of each in the Civil Service of India – laid its tribute of respect in his path, until from Simla to Scinde and on to Bombay the long sun of his military life seemed to be setting in waves of glory. But the tribute of honour that touched him deepest was a magnificent sword which the sirdars and chiefs of Scinde presented to him at Hyderabad. Nearly eight years earlier these men had fought against Napier at Meanee and Dubba. He had honoured their bravery in the hour of their misfortune. Now about to quit, under a cloud of official censure everywhere made public, the scene of his toil and glory, they, his old enemies, came to lay at his feet this token of their admiration.

CHAPTER XIV

HOME – LAST ILLNESS – DEATH

In March, 1851, Napier reached England. Many times, returning from some scene of war or foreign service, had he seen the white cliffs rise out of the blue waves. This was to be his last arrival, and perhaps it was the saddest in all his life. "I retire with a reprimand," he had said a few months earlier; and although he tried hard to keep in view the fact that in circumstances of sudden and grave danger to the State he had acted firmly, courageously, honestly, and with absolute sense and wisdom in every step he had taken, still all that only served to drive deeper into his injustice-hating heart the sting of unmerited and unjust censure.

He came home to die. Not all at once, indeed, did the end come. Such gnarled old oaks do not wither of a sudden, no matter how rude may be the shock; but the iron had entered into his soul, and the months of life that still remained were to be chiefly passed in pain and suffering. At first, after his arrival, business took him to London, and the long-dreamt-of happy gardening-ground in Hampshire was denied him. All through life he had hated the great city. "To be in London is to be a beast – a harnessed and driven beast – and nothing more," he writes. Neither its dinners nor its compliments nor its "pompous insolence" had ever given him the least concern. Like another great soldier who, in this year, 1851, was about to begin that military career which was to render his name so famous, Charles Napier had a contempt for the capital of his country. When the Directors of the East India Company had been on their knees to him, and the Lord Mayor and the rest of the great dining dignitaries had been begging his attendance at their banquets during the Punjaub disasters, he had not been in the least elated; and neither now was he depressed by their studied neglect of him when danger had passed by. "I never was in spirits at a London party," he writes, "since I came out of my teens."

In April he gets away to Oaklands, and prepares to settle down to the repose of a country life. "At last a house of mine own," he says. "All my life I have longed for this." But scarcely is he at home ere the disease, contracted in Scinde, increased in India, and aggravated by the ill-usage of the past year, brings him to the verge of death. He rallies again, but his thoughts are now set upon the great leave-taking. In his journal we seem to see him all the clearer as the end approaches. "When I die may the poor regret me," he writes; "if they do, their judgment will be more in my favour than anything else. My pride and happiness through life has been that the soldiers loved me… I treated every soldier as my friend and comrade, whatever his rank was." What a contempt he has for the upstart in uniform, the martinet, the thing with the drawl and eyeglass! "As military knowledge decays, aristocratic, or rather upstart arrogance, increases," he writes. "A man of high breeding is hand and glove with his men, while the son of your millionaire hardly speaks to a soldier." Then he turns to the "coming world and all those I hope to meet there – Alexander, Hannibal, Cæsar, Napoleon, and my father." But the long-looked-for peace of life in the country – the garden, the pets, and the rest of it – is not to be. He has a beautiful Pyrenean dog, Pastor by name. A neighbouring farmer wantonly shoots this noble animal. Napier tries to punish the man at law. The case is clear against the dog-killer, but the local jury acquits him in spite of judge and evidence. "Trial by jury is a farce," we read in the journal. "Why, if Goslin [the dog-killer] had murdered his wife and child, they [the jury] could not have treated him more gently!"

Then come other worries of a more serious character. The East India Directors are doing all that wealth and power can do to take from him his Scinde prize-money. He was not the Commander-in-Chief of the army, they say, with a monstrous effrontery; and of course they have anonymous scribblers everywhere at work to blacken and defame their enemy. So, between the local numskull murdering his pet dogs and the cosmopolitan master-shop-keeper vilifying his character, the last months of the old soldier's life are vexed and unhappy.

Still, as the end draws nearer many bright gleams of sunshine come to gladden the old man's heart. Not only is the great heart of the nation with him, but all the kings of thought are on his side too. When the great Duke passes to his rest no figure in the throng of war-worn veterans around the coffin was so eagerly sought for as that of the man who, forty-two years earlier, had waved his hat to Lord Wellington when, unable to speak as he was carried desperately wounded from the fierce fight at Busaco, he thought this mute farewell was to be a last adieu. Men noted too with inward sense of satisfaction at the scene in St. Paul's that "the eagle face and bold strong eye" of the veteran who stood by the dead Duke's bier gave promise that England had a great war-leader still left to her.

But the "eagle face and the bold strong eye" were only those echoes of bygone life which are said to be strong as the shadows gather. And the shadows were gathering fast now. In June, 1853, the illness that was to prove mortal began. Still, we find him writing letters to help some old soldier who had served him in Scinde, and in the very last letter that he seems ever to have written, the names of Sergeant Power and Privates Burke and Maloney stand witness to the love for the private soldier which this heroic heart carried to the very verge of the grave. In July he was brought to Oaklands, as he wished that the end should come to him in his own home. There, stretched upon a little camp-bed in a room on the ground-floor of the house, he waited for death. It came with those slow hours of pain and suffering which so frequently mark the passing away of those in whom the spirit of life has been strong, and who have fought death so often that he seems afraid to approach and seize such tough antagonists. Frequently during the weeks of illness the old instincts would assert themselves in the sufferer. He would ask his veteran brother to defend his memory when he was gone, from the attacks of his enemies; or he would send messages through his son-in-law to the "poor soldiers," to tell them how he had loved them; and once he asked that his favourite charger, Red Rover – the horse that had carried him through the storm of battle at Meanee – might be brought to the bedside, so that for a last time he might speak a word to and caress the animal; but the poor beast seemed to realise the mortal danger of his old master, and shrank startled from the sick couch. As the month of August drew to a close it was evident to those who lovingly watched beside the sufferer that the end was close at hand. It came on the early morning of the 29th. The full light of the summer morning was streaming into the room, lighting up the shields, swords, and standards of Eastern fight which hung upon the walls; the old colours of the Twenty-Second, rent and torn by shot, moved gently in the air, fresh with the perfume of the ripened summer; wife, children, brothers, servants, and two veteran soldiers who had stood behind him in battle, watched – some praying, some weeping, some immovable and fixed in their sorrow – the final dissolution; and just as the heroic spirit passed to Him who had sent it upon earth, filled with so many noble aspirations and generous sympathies, a brave man who stood near caught the flags of the Twenty-Second Regiment from their resting-place and waved these shattered emblems of battle above the dying soldier. So closed the life of Charles Napier. When a great soldier who had carried the arms of Rome into remotest regions lay dying in the imperial city, the historian Tacitus tells us that "in the last glimpse of light" the hero "looked with an asking eye for something that was absent." Not so with Napier. Those he had loved so devotedly, those who had fought around him so bravely, those who had shielded his name in life from the malice of enemies, and who were still to do battle for him when he was in the grave – all these loving, true, and faithful figures met his last look on earth.

They laid Charles Napier beneath the grass of the old garrison graveyard in Portsmouth, for the dull resentment of oligarchic faction is strongest in the death of heroes, and a studied silence closed the doors of the two great cathedrals of the capital against ashes which would have honoured even the roll of the mighty dead who sleep within these hallowed precincts. Faction, for the moment dressed in power, forgot that by neglecting to place the body of Charles Napier with his peers, it was only insulting the dust of ten centuries of English heroism; and yet even in this neglect the animosity of power misplaced was but able to effect its own discomfiture, for Napier sleeps in death as he lived in life – among the brave and humble soldiers he had loved to lead; and neither lofty dome nor glory of Gothic cathedral could fitter hold his ashes than the narrow grave beside the shore where the foot of Nelson last touched the soil of England.

It was on September 8th, 1853, that the funeral took place at Portsmouth. Sixty thousand people – and all the soldiers who could come from miles around, not marching as a matter of duty, but flocking of their own accord and at their own expense to do honour to their dead comrade – followed the procession in reverent silence. Well might the soldiers of England mourn, not indeed for the leader but for themselves. Little more than one year had to pass ere these Linesmen, these Highlanders, these Riflemen, and twenty thousand of their brethren, lions though they were, would be dying like sheep on the plateau before Sebastopol – dying for the want of some real leader of men to think for them, to strive for them, to lead them. Two years later to a day, on September 8th, 1855, men looking gloomily at the Russian Redan and its baffled assailants might well remember "the eagle face and bold strong eye" and vainly long for one hour of Meanee's leading.

Nations, no matter how powerful, cannot afford to ill-use or neglect their heroes, for punishment follows swiftly such neglect, and falls where least expected. In an old Irish manuscript that has but lately seen the light, there is given in a few terse words a definition of the attributes of character which go to form a leader of men. "Five things," says this quaint chronicle, "are required in a general. Knowledge, Valour, Foresight, Authoritie, and Fortune. He that is not endowed for all or for most of these virtues is not to be reputed fit for his charge. Nor can this glory be purchased but by practice and proof; for the greatest fencer is not always the best fighter, nor the fairest tilter the ablest soldier, nor the primest favourite in court the fittest commander in camp." How aptly this description of a leader fits Charles Napier the reader can best judge. Knowledge, Valour, and Foresight he possessed to an extraordinary degree. Authority, so pertinaciously denied him by his chiefs, he asserted over men without the smallest difficulty. Fortune in the field was also largely his. How hard he practised to perfect all these gifts, and how repeated was their proof, no one who has read his life will venture to deny. But Charles Napier was many other things besides a great general. He had a hundred gifts and graces of character that must have made him famous in any sphere of life he had selected, and made him famous, not by the passive assent given by his fellows to his possession of some local eminence of character showing large amid the level of their own mediocrity, but by the sheer force of the genius that was in him, the flame of which was certain to force its way to the surface, despite all the efforts of envy to keep it down. Never lived there soldier who had so little greatness thrust upon him. From the day he began his military career to the moment he hung up his father's sword at Oaklands he had to win every grade and every honour three times over. He seemed, indeed, to delight in the consciousness that he possessed this triple power of conquest. Do what they would to deny him, he would go out again and force them to acknowledge him. And it was this inward consciousness of power that made him despise the trappings of rank or position which other men held so high. Like his great ancestor, Henry of Navarre, he laughed at pomp and parade. "Pomp, parade, and severe gravity of expression," said the great Bourbon, "belong to those who feel that without them they would have nothing that would impress respect. By the grace of God I have in myself that which makes me think I am worthy of being a king." So, too, like the Béarnois, Napier grounded his greatness deep down in the welfare of the peasant, in his love for them, and in the first prerogative of true leadership, the right of thinking and toiling for the benefit of the poor and humble. "My predecessors thought themselves dishonoured by knowing the value of a teston," Henry used to say. "I am anxious to know the value of half a denier, and what difficulty the poor have to get it. For I want all my subjects to have a fowl in the pot every Sunday." So was it with this soldier who was sixth in descent from the first Bourbon, and who fought so hard to keep the last on a throne his race would never have forfeited had they but remembered this golden rule of all true kingship.

Two things Napier carried through life of infinite importance – memory of home and hero-worship. He moved through life between these two lode-stones. The noble independence of mind possessed by his father, the ocean of love and tenderness of his mother, the associations of his early home, these were ever present through the wildest and roughest scenes of life – hallowed memories, green spots that deserts could not wither, nor fiercest fighting destroy. And in front lay the lofty ideal, the noble aspiration. Alexander, Hannibal, Cæsar, Napoleon – from early manhood these names were magnets to lift his mind above low desires and sordid cares, and when the shadows of death were gathering they still stood as lofty lights above the insults and the injustice of his enemies.

Carious too is it to watch in the career of Charles Napier how, out of the garden of memory which he kept green in his heart, many flowers sprang up as time went on, how his faith in an all-wise Providence strengthened and increased, how life beyond the grave became a positive necessity to him, how he looked forward to the time when men will think only of "acting right in the eyes of God, for then Christ will rule the world. What result will follow this utter defeat of the evil spirit, the God in heaven only knows, but the work will be Christ's work, and He will perhaps come to rule us with eternal life and happiness for those who have adhered to the Good Spirit – the God, who will then direct all things to His will." So must it ever be with the truly great minds which are based on what Mr. Ruskin calls "an infinitude of tenderness." They no more can live without religion than an oak-tree can grow without the sun. The mushroom, and the fungi, and the orchid of the human species may indeed flourish in the night of denial, but the hero is as certain to believe in God as the eagle is to seek the mountain-top.

Great lives have two lessons – one for the class to which the life belonged, the other to the nation which gave it birth. The latter is the lesson of paramount importance; for as the past is ever a mirror held up to the present in which to read the future, so the life of a dead hero may be said to mark for statesmen and rulers the rocks and shallows of their system of government. Never perhaps did a nation pay more swiftly and to the full the penalty of being blind to the real nature of the son which had been born to her than did England in her neglect of Napier. There are those who, writing and speaking of him since his death, have regretted his "utterances of passion," his "combativeness," his want of "serenity." "They [Charles Napier and his brother William] lived in storm instead of above the clouds," wrote one of their greatest admirers when both brothers had passed away; and if this has been said since they have left us, a hundredfold stronger was the censure of the world when they still moved among their fellow-men. But the passion and the vehemence of the Napiers was only the ocean wave of their hatred of oppression thundering against the bulwarks of tyranny. They should have dwelt above the clouds, forsooth, made less noise, toned down the vehemence of their denunciation. How easy all this is after the battle is over, and when we are sitting in a cushioned chair with our feet to the fire! But find me anything overthrown without noise, my friend – any citadel of human wrong captured, any battle ever won by the above-the-cloud method, – and I'll say you are right about these Napiers. Summer lightning is a very pretty thing, but lightning that has thunder behind it is something more than pretty. But perhaps I am wrong. They tell us now that battles are in future to be silent affairs – powder is to make no smoke, rifles and artillery are to go off without noise; there is to be no "vehemence" or "passion" about anything; you are to turn a noiseless wheel and the whole thing will be quietly done. All this is very nice, but I have an idea that when our sapient scientific soldier has arrived at all this noiseless excellence he will be inclined to follow the example of his rifle, and go off himself, making as little noise as possible in the operation, but in a direction opposite to his gun. So, being doubtful as to this question of noise, I turn to Charles Napier once more, and strangely enough this is what I read: "The rifle perfected will ring the knell of British superiority. The charging shouts of England's athletic soldiers will no longer be heard. Who will gain by this new order of fighting? Certainly the most numerous infantry. The soldier will think how he can hide himself from his enemy instead of how to drive a bayonet into that enemy's body."[5 - Defects of Indian Government.]

One other point ere my task is done. The present is pre-eminently the age when men long most to ring the coin of success, and hear it jingle during life. People will say of Napier that he stood in his own light. It is true he told the truth, but look what it cost him. Had he kept silence he would have been made a peer; they would have buried him in St. Paul's or Westminster Abbey, and put a grand monument over his grave. Hearing which and thinking upon it one comes to ask a simple question, – What is success? As the world translates the phrase, Napier was perhaps not a successful man. Yet he lived to see the principles he had struggled for through life, and suffered for in his struggles, everywhere triumphant. The great circle of human sympathy growing wider with every hour, and some new tribe among the toiling outcasts of men taken within its long-closed limits. He lived to see a Greater Britain and a larger Ireland growing beyond the seas – fulfilling, in regions never dreamt of by Canning, the work of liberty and progress which that Minister had vainly imagined was to be the mission of the South American Republics.