The difficulty of commenting on a posthumous work is much enhanced when the author happens to have been, like the late Sir Charles Napier, one whose errors of the pen are more than redeemed by a career of long and glorious services. Still, though this consideration may soften, it ought not to silence criticism, for errors never more require correction than when heralded by an illustrious name. An additional reason for not passing over the last work of so distinguished a man is, that it contains many admirable remarks on the Native army, well deserving to be detached from the mass of other matter in which they are imbedded. The contents of the book may be classed under three heads: Censure of individuals; censure of public bodies; suggestive remarks on the civil and military administration of India.
On whatever comes under the first of these heads, our strictures shall be brief.
We find in the list of those censured, the names of so many of the best and ablest men who have taken part in Indian affairs, either at home or in the East, that we feel loth to give any additional publicity to what we have read with pain, and would gladly forget. Public bodies being fair targets to shoot at, the censures coming under the second head are open to no objection excepting such as may arise from their not standing the test of close examination. The Court of Directors, the Supreme Council of India, the whole body of the Civil Service (with one or two exceptions), the Political Agents, the Military Board in Calcutta, and the Board of Administration in the Punjab, follow each other like arraigned criminals in the black scroll of the author’s antipathies. To notice all that is advanced against those included in this catalogue would be impossible, for a few lines may contain assertions which it would fill a folio to discuss. Of the East India Company, the instrument through which India has been providentially preserved from the corruptions of an aristocratic and the precipitancy of a more popular rule, Sir Charles Napier’s view is not more enlarged than what we might have got from his own Sir Fiddle Faddle, of whom he has left us (at page 253) so amusing a description. Though capable, as we shall soon see, of rising above the prejudices of his profession on other points, he looks at this singular Company and its governing Court with the eyes of a Dugald Dalgetty, who, while pocketing the commercial body’s extra pay, accounts it foul scorn to be obliged to submit to such base and mechanical control.
But none are all bad, and we rejoice to see it admitted at page 210 of the unfriendly book before us, that “the Directors, generally speaking, treat their army well;” and at pages 49, 261, that the Company’s artillery, formed under the rule of these very Directors, is “superb, second to none in the world—perfect.” Yet it never seems to have occurred to the author, that those under whose rule one department has reached perfection, are not likely to blunder in every other, as in his moments of spleen he made himself believe. So able a man as Sir C. Napier could not always be blind to his own inconsistencies; and accordingly, in the midst of some declamation on what India might be under royal government, he seems to have been suddenly brought up by a thought about what the Crown Colonies really are.
From this dilemma he escapes by saddling one distinguished personage with the blame of all that is wrong in the colonies, and thus punishes Earl Grey for the speech about Scinde, made by Lord Howick, some ten years ago, in the House of Commons.
To the Supreme Council of India, though he was one of their number, the author never makes any but disparaging allusions. Discontented with being a commander-in-chief under a ruling body, of which he was himself a member, he sought to be recognised as the head of a separate military government. He wished, in short, to be, not what the Duke of York was in England, but what, under peculiar circumstances, the Duke of Wellington was in Spain during the war in the Peninsula. In this he was not singular; for we suspect that the real cause of that uneasiness in their position, stated at page 355, to have been manifested by many of Sir C. Napier’s predecessors, is to be found in a desire on their part for such an independency of military administrative power, as is totally incompatible with the necessary unity and indivisibility of a government. Yet it is admitted that, in England, “when war comes, the war-minister is the real commander,”—(p. 220.) The author evidently felt how much this admission must tell against his own complaints of undue interference with his authority; for he endeavours, by some feeble special pleading, to abate its effect, and to prove the “poor Indian general,” with his £15,000 a year, to be more unfavourably placed than his confrère in England.
One circumstance, however, is such, that while the latter is excluded from the Cabinet, the former can take his seat at the Council-Board, and his part in the guidance of the counsels of the State.
It is, we think, greatly to be regretted that Sir C. Napier did not more frequently avail himself of this privilege, for by keeping apart from the Supreme Council he lost the benefit of free personal communication with equals, and incurred the evil of having none near him but subordinates, whom he could silence by a word or a look.
The Civil Service is represented simply as a nuisance requiring immediate abatement.
We are told that “a Civil form of government is uncongenial to barbarous Eastern nations.” There is some truth in this, if a proper stress is laid on the word barbarous. In the first chapter of the fourth part of his work, Mr Kaye has shown how, in reaching the outskirts of civilisation, we are brought into contact with rude tribes like the Beloches in Scinde, “to whose feelings and habits the rough ways of Sir C. Napier were better adapted than the refined tenderness or the judicial niceties of the gentlest and wisest statesman that ever loved and toiled for a people.” But the error of such reasoners as Sir C. Napier is, that they would treat all India as barbarous, and rule it accordingly. Now, with all our respect for Sir C. Napier’s talents, we doubt much whether he would have governed the more civilised provinces of Upper India better than the late Mr Thomason, whom he condescends to praise—(p. 37); or managed the subtle and well-mannered Sikhs with more tact and skill than Sir George Clerk during the perilous period of our disasters in 1841–42.