But this work was far more than a treatise upon Colonisation. A large portion of it was devoted to the exposure of the fatal effects inevitable from the system of large farm-cultivation then, and for so many years after, in wildest swing. Living in France at the time, he was able to compare the general level of comfort enjoyed there by the small proprietor with the misery of the labouring class in England. The boasted "wealth of England," he scornfully remarks, "is to her vast poor and pauper classes as the potato and 'pint' of the Irish labourer; the Irish may point his potato towards the wretched rasher suspended above the table, the English poor may speak with bated breath of the wealth of their country, but they are not to get the smallest taste of it." Clearly he predicts the day when the landed interest shall suffer for their accumulated sins, and he addresses them in anticipatory language such as Hannibal spoke in scorn to the Carthaginian Senate when they wept over the disasters of Carthage. "Ye weep for the loss of your money, not for the loss of your people. I laugh at your anguish, and my scorn for you is sorrow for Carthage." A book full of sense, of long and widely-gathered experience, of keen and trenchant reflection, all aflame against stupidity, wrongdoing, and official blundering; all abounding with sympathy for the weak, for the oppressed, for the suffering. Shortly after his return to England his other book on _Military Law_ was published. As we have already said, the title was misleading. The work treated on many subjects besides Military Law, and touched on a thousand points of military interest. It is in fact an elaborate treatise upon soldiers, their peculiarities, their virtues, and their shortcomings. He recalls with pride the fact that it was not at the door of the regular soldiers the atrocities of 1798 in Ireland could be laid, and remembers how when Hamilton Rowan's house was searched by the military, a single silver spoon that was taken was restored to its owner, although, adds Napier at the time, "I saw the Castle of Dublin filled with the rich and powerful, many among them daily robbing the silver spoons of the public." But in this book, as in all his writing, there is one subject upon which he is never tired. It is the man in the ranks. How intimately he knew that man, how truly he loved him, all these multiplied pages of journals, letters, and books tell. He has not the gift of that sublime and eloquent language in which his brother has made the deeds of the British soldier in the Peninsular War immortal--that English classic which, like a stately temple of old, so grand amid the puny efforts of later architecture, stands out amid modern word-building in a magnificence of diction that becomes more solemn and stately with the growth of time; but if this rare gift is wanting in Charles Napier, every pulse of his own soldier nature beats for the man in the ranks. He has seen him at all times and in all places.