SIR WILLIAM BUTLER'S " NAPIER."

`SIR WILLIAM BUTLER, was certainly the right man to have written this short Life of Sir Charles Napier. The impassioned pages in which he has recorded the story of the great soldier, great administrator, and great lover of the people, suit the subject in a way that no calmer or even j aster record could have suited it. Whether in his enthusiastic love of his calling, his profound disgust against his calling, his intense and vehement sympathy with the weak, the poor, the humble, the ignorant, his noble aspirations after the redress of all wrongs, his fierce hatred of oppression, his ardent Radicalism, his splendid personal valour, physical and moral, his virtues or his extrava- gances, Sir Charles Napier has here a biographer who sympathises in all alike, who therefore, if he does not measure, does portray his' hero, and, as is fitting in such a -case, writes with a pen dipped not in ink but in fire.

For Sir William Butler, it is inevitable that whoever crosses this hero's path, with a very uncertain exception in the case of Sir James Outram, should be cast into the nethermost hell. We think we trace a disposition to sentence Outram, in con- sideration of other virtues, only to a limited sojourn in purga- torial flames. At any rate, the subject of the differences of two such men is too painful to be dwelt on, and it is brushed aside in a single sentence. The whole of the Latin and Teutonic races, however, including the English, emphatically every Civil officer who ever did duty under the East India Company, whether in London or in India, nearly every English statesman, and many humbler• people, are consigned, without a sigh, to the bottomless pit. All the virtues of the world, all the valour that has gained victory on British battle-fields, are, and have always been, the exclusive possession of the Norman, the Frank, and the Celt. Sometimes these extravagances become comic to an extent that makes one doubt whether 'even their author does not see that he is carried away by his own eloquence. For instance, Cromwell is a great hero of Sir Charles. " Old Oliver's day, the day he wen Dunbar and Worcester, and the day he died," is for Sir Charles "a very, good day to die on." The fact is duly recorded, but naturally without comment. For Dunbar and Worcester recall the fact that once in the history of these isles, the question of valour on the battle-field, and much else, had to be fairly fought out by the English race, under an English leader•, against the Norman and the Celt. Then the Norman and the Celt were " like dust before the wind, and the Angel of the Lord scattering them." Heaven forbid that we should dis- parage the glorious services which the Celtic and the Norman race have rendered during the course of our common national history. It was British battles which Wellington won. India 'was conquered by Britain, including Ireland under that one general name, if we may use it for lack of any one more compre- hensive. It is not well that these questions should be raised ; but it is well that when, in his wild extravagance, Sir William denounces everything English, English policy, English government, English commerce, English valour, he should be reminded that the silence of pure Englishmen on these points is the silence of assured confidence, of hearty wishes for the true national unity of our mixed race, of a desire

• Sir Charles Napier. By Colonel Biz William Butler. London Macmillan end Co. MO.

to do full justice and more to the services rendered by others to the common weal. We do not forget, if he does, that, to name no others besides, Cromwell, Shakespeare and

Milton, Hampden and Sidney, Chatham and Bacon were Englishmen to the backbone. But it is not only in these wild,

racial antipathies that Sir William carries the extravagances of his hero to a point that makes them topple over into a pit where there is too much laughter for much gnashing of teeth.

In a passage in his own diary, in which for his own benefit he is frankly recounting what he knows to be his own noble weakness as an Administrator in Soinde, Sir Charles writes :-

" The poor people come to me with earnest prayers—they never come without cause—but they are such liars and so bad at explaining, that were their language understood by me, it would be hard to reach facts On all these occasions my plan is a most unjust one, for against all evidence I decide in favour of the poor, and argue against the argument of the Government people as long as I can. When borne down by proofs irrefragable,' like Alexander I cut the knot and give an atrocious verdict against ' clearest proof.' My formula is this : punish the Government servants first, and inquire about the right and wrong when there is time. This is the way to prevent tyranny, to make the people happy, and to render public servants honest."

On which frank confession to his pillow of conscious injustice, of sentiment carrying it over right, Sir William comments thus :—

" Space forbids us longer leave to delve in this rich mine of justice. It is a fine picture—one that the world does not see enough of—this victorious old soldier riding through the con- quered land intent on justice, sparing himself nothing to lift up the poor, to free the toiler, to unbind the slave."

The confessed " injustice " of the hero has become " justice "

for the biographer. Now, it is a noble work " to lift up the poor, to free the toiler, to unbind the slave ; " but can it be done on these principles P Undoubtedly many a condemned prisoner has been a righteous man, condemned because of his righteousness,—for instance, one Jesus of Nazareth, one Socrates, one Galileo, one Hampden. Many a Judge, ermined and otherwise, has been a criminal upon the bench,— for instance, one Herod, one Jeffreys. But if the despot who has set himself to redress human wrongs, at once without inquiry or in the teeth of evidence, and because the prisoner

and his witnesses lie, sends every Judge to the condemned cell, and seats every convicted robber and murderer on the right

hand of power, who will suffer most ? Surely it will be the poor, the toiler and the slave. Murder and rapine will stalk

through the land, and being by their nature cowardly and base, will take the pay of the rich and will oppress the poor. We say this in all earnestness, for throughout his book it is of the year 1890 and the Green Island that Sir William Butler is thinking. His passionate eloquence, often very noble and full of high thought, is always directed to teach us that, supposing we know that any members of the Irish party are reckless, convicted, and eloquent liars, then we ought to send Mr. Balfour and the Constabulary, not into the dock, but into the condemned cells. It would hardly be possible to put the principles at issue between the Unionists and the senti- mentalists into more eloquent language, or into language which to any reasonable man carries more conviction of the folly of that which the author advocates, and of its inevitable result.

It is Sir William, and not Sir Charles, who is responsible for the suggested practical application of these wild theories.

For if in both his movement into Soinde and his administra- tion there, Sir Charles gave some occasion to his enemies to blaspheme, his administration of the Northern District of England was admirable. Sympathetic towards the very men whom he bad to restrain, yet firm in the upholding of order, he gave a. model of the mode in which he would have ad- ministered Ireland, which has been illustrated in our own time by Mr. Balfour's firm and sympathetic government of that difficult country. These questions, into which Sir William Butler has flung himself with Celtic fury, are so interesting at the present moment that we have not left ourselves space to discuss Sir William's treatment of the military career of the great soldier. Suffice it to say that we heartily agree with his dictum that Westminster, the ashes of the great dead, and the House of Lords were insulted, and that Sir Charles lost nothing by the fact that he was buried as a commoner in the old garrison graveyard in Portsmouth. It was a fitting place of burial for the soldier's 'friend, and the House of Lords would have been no place for him. Yet he was among our greatest and our most noble.