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