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.