Meanwhile the Greek insurrection had run its course of blood and devastation, and as yet out of its four years' chaos of desolation victory had not dawned upon either combatants. Ibrahim, the son of Mehemet Ali, had now carried an army of Egyptian and Nubian soldiers into the Morea, and men, women, and children were being slaughtered by this clever but cruel master of war. Till this time Napier had longed to throw his sword into the scale with the struggling Greeks, but his desire was tempered with a just determination that no premature or foolhardy action should give his enemies the opportunity he knew so well they longed for. He feared to find himself suddenly struck out of the army list, and his service of thirty years with all its toils and wounds thrown away. "When I saw Greece about to rise in strength and glory my resolve was to join her," he says, "if it could be done with advantage to her just cause and honour to myself. The talent of the people, and their warlike qualities, excited my admiration, for a Greek seems a born soldier, and has no thought but war. Their vanity and love of glory equal those feelings with the French, but the Greeks are more like the Irish than any other people; so like even to the oppression they suffer that, as I could not do good to Ireland, the next pleasure was to serve men groaning under similar tyranny." In the autumn of 1825 the negotiations between him and the Greeks, which had previously fallen through owing to difficulties about his commission in the British army, were again resumed, and matters were all but concluded when a proclamation forbidding officers to serve the Greek cause was published in England. Still Napier was prepared to sever his connection with the army and throw in his lot with the Greeks, provided certain guarantees were given for the equipment and payment of a small regular force, and for the value of his own commission which would be sacrificed by the step. The Greeks in Greece were ready to assent to these propositions, and to any others which Napier might desire to stipulate, so anxious were they now in this dark hour of their fortune to secure his service as Commander-in-Chief; but the bond-holders in London, these curses of all good causes, had their own views as to what should be done, and they were more desirous of spending their money in sending out a useless fleet than in equipping the nucleus of a regular force, which under such a leader as Napier would have been of incalculable benefit to Greece. Thus the whole project fell to the ground, and Napier had to remain in Cephalonia for four years more, and to content himself with his roads and bridges, his purer administration of justice, his efforts to improve the lot of the husbandman, to lessen the unjust privileges of the nobles, to increase the produce of the island, and, harder than any of these things, to battle against ignorance in high places, against the sting of censure from stupidity