But this admirable force was not to be used. The battle of Sobraon was the prelude to a patched-up peace, which divided the Sikh State, depleted the Sikh treasury, but left intact the Sikh army. The generalship on the Sutlej had been indifferent; the policy that followed the campaign was still larger marked by want of foresight. Napier, ordered to leave his army at Bahawalpore, had proceeded alone to Lahore to advise and assist the negotiations for peace. He joined Hardinge, Gough, and Smith in the Sikh capital, receiving a tremendous ovation from the troops and a cordial welcome from the three chiefs, who, if they were not brilliant generals, were chivalrous and gallant soldiers. It must have been a fine sight these four old warriors of the Peninsula going in state to the palace of the Maharajah at Lahore. Napier, though keen to catch the errors of the campaign, has nothing but honour and regard for his brother-generals. "Gough is a glorious old fellow," he writes; "brave as _ten_ lions, each with two sets of teeth and two tails." "Harry Smith did his work well." And of Hardinge's answer to those who urged him to retreat during the night after the first day's carnage at Ferozeshah--"No, we will abide the break of day, and then either sweep all before us or die honourably"--he cannot say too much; but all this does not blind him to the waste of human life that want of foresight had caused. "We have beaten the Sikhs in every action," he writes, "with our glorious, most glorious soldiers, but thousands of those brave men have bit the dust who ought now to be standing sword in hand victorious at the gates of Lahore." "Do you recollect saying to me," he asks his brother, "'Our soldiers will fight any general through his blunders'? Well, now, judge your own prophecy." Finally, all the foresight of the man's mind comes out in these prophetic words, written when the war had just closed, "This tragedy must be reacted a year or two hence; we shall have another war." Chillianwallah and Goojerat had yet to be. Back to Scinde again to take up the old labour of civil administration, and work out to practical solution a hundred problems of justice, commerce, land-tenure, agriculture, and taxation,--in fine, to build upon the space cleared by war the stately edifice of a wise and beneficent human government, keeping always in view certain fundamental rules of honesty, truth, justice, and wisdom, learned long years before in Ireland at his father's side. Napier's system of rule was after all a very old one. It went back before ever a political economist set pen to paper. Anybody who will turn to the pages of Massinger will find it set forth clearly enough at the time King and Parliament were coming to loggerheads over certain things called Prerogative and Privilege--words which, if the weal of the soil-tiller be forgotten, are only empty and meaningless balderdash. Here are the men whose goods are lawful prize in the philosophy of the old dramatist--