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.
FOOTNOTE:
[4] It should be unnecessary to remind my readers of the fine poem in which Sir Francis Doyle, whose heart always went out to knightly deeds, has commemorated this incident,—The Red Thread of Honour.