Napier had reached his fifty-sixth year; for eight years he had been unemployed. He was now a major-general, but his half-pay was wretchedly inadequate to his necessities, and he felt that the shadow of age could not be much longer delayed. Poverty, neglect, old age, obscurity--these were the requitals of a life as arduous, as brave, as honourable, and as devoted to duty as any recorded in our military annals. Fired by the news that he was again to be passed over for some appointment, he made in this year, 1838, a last appeal for justice. In this letter he reviews his long service, beginning at Corunna thirty years earlier. He shows how junior officers who had served under his orders had received rewards and promotion, and how favours denied to him as "being impossible" had been given to others whose record of battle and wound had not been equal to his own. In the end of the letter the fear that is in his heart comes out. He hopes that "consideration may be shown to his long services--services which at fifty-six years of age cannot be much longer available." Still no work for this tireless worker. Then he goes back to his books, writes a romance called _Harold_, edits De Vigny's _Lights and Shades of Military Life_, and turning his attention again to Ireland, publishes an essay addressed to Irish absentees on the state of Ireland. But now the long night was wearing out. In March, 1839, he received in Ireland, where he has been living for six months, a summons from Lord John Russell. He proceeds at once to London, is offered and accepts the command of the northern district, where the working classes, justly enraged at having been used by the Whigs to wring reform from their enemies, and then flung aside and denied all representative power, were now combining in dangerous numbers to force from the men they had put in office the several reforms of the Constitution which were grouped under the title of Charter. Taking from the example of the Whigs the threat of physical force which that party had not scrupled to use in their struggle for reform, the Chartists openly avowed their intention of redressing their wrongs by arms. In offering the command of the north of England to Napier the Government showed signal judgment, for on all the important points of the Charter--vote by ballot, manhood suffrage, and short parliaments--he was himself a Chartist; but he well knew that of all evils that can visit man that of civil war is the very worst, and while on the one hand he would tell the governing powers that the tide of true popular right can only be finally regulated by the floodgates of concession timely opened, he would equally let destructive demagogues know that if physical force was to be invoked he, as a soldier, was its master. CHAPTER VII COMMAND OF THE NORTHERN DISTRICT