CHAPTER VI

IRELAND AND AMERICA

Froude had made history the business of his life, and he had no sooner completed his History of England than he turned his attention to the sister people. The Irish chapters in his great book had been picked out by hostile critics as especially good, and in them he had strongly condemned the cruel misgovernment of an Englishman otherwise so humane as Essex. While he was in Ireland he had examined large stores of material in Dublin, which he compared with documents at the Record Office in London, and he contemplated early in 1871, if not before, a book on Irish history. For this task he was not altogether well qualified. The religion of Celtic Ireland was repugnant to him, and he never thoroughly understood it. In religious matters Froude could not be neutral. Where Catholic and Protestant came into conflict, he took instinctively, almost involuntarily, the Protestant side. In the England of the sixteenth century the Protestant side was the side of England. In Ireland the case was reversed, and the spirit of Catholicism was identical with the spirit of nationality. Irish Catholics to this day associate Protestantism with the sack of Drogheda and Wexford, with the detested memory of Oliver Cromwell. To Froude, as to Carlyle, Cromwell was the minister of divine vengeance upon murderous and idolatrous Papists. His liking for the Irish, though perfectly genuine, was accompanied with an underlying contempt which is more offensive to the objects of it than the hatred of an open foe. He regarded them as a race unfit for self-government, who had proved their unworthiness of freedom by not winning it with the sword. If they had not quarrelled among themselves, and betrayed one another, they would have established their right to independence; or, if there had been still an Act of Union, they could have come in, as the Scots came, on their own terms. For an Englishman to write the history of Ireland without prejudice he must be either a cosmopolitan philosopher, or a passionless recluse. Froude was an ardent patriot, and his early studies in hagiology had led him to the conclusion, not now accepted, that St. Patrick never existed at all. His scepticism about St. Patrick might have been forgiven to a man who had probably not much belief in St. George. But Froude could not help running amok at all the popular heroes of Ireland. In the first of his two papers describing a fortnight in Kerry he went out of his way to depreciate the fame of Daniel O'Connell. "Ireland," he wrote, "has ceased to care for him. His fame blazed like a straw bonfire, and has left behind it scarce a shovelful of ashes. Never any public man had it in his power to do so much good for his country, nor was there ever one who accomplished so little."*

— * Short Studies, vol. ii. p. 241. —

That O'Connell wasted much time in clamouring for Repeal is perfectly true. But he was as much the author of Catholic Emancipation as Cobden was the author of Free Trade, and that fact alone should have debarred Froude from the use of this extravagant language. For though an article in Fraser's Magazine is a very different thing from a serious history, print imposes some obligations, and even two or three casual sentences may show the bent of a man's mind. Whatever Froude wrote on Ireland, or on anything else, was sure to be widely read, and to affect, for good or for evil, the opinion of the British public. It was therefore peculiarly incumbent on him not to flatter English pride by wounding Irish self-respect.

While Froude was writing his English in Ireland he received an invitation to give a series of lectures in the United States. "The Yankees," he says to Skelton,+ "have written to me about going over to lecture to them. I am strongly tempted; but I could not tell the truth about Ireland without reflecting in a good many ways on my own country. I don't fancy doing that, however justly, to amuse Jonathan." These words certainly do not show implacable bitterness against Ireland. Brought face to face with responsibility, Froude always felt the weight of it, and he was never consciously unfair. He was under a strong sense of obligation, which he felt bound to fulfil. It is impossible not to admire the chivalrous and intrepid spirit with which he undertook singlehanded to justify the conduct of his countrymen before the American people, and to persuade them that England had provocation for her treatment of Ireland. Once convinced that his cause was righteous, he never flinched. He believed that false views of the Irish question prevailed in America, and that he could set them right. He did not altogether underrate the magnitude of the enterprise. "I go like an Arab of the desert," he wrote to Skelton a little later: "my hand will be against every man, and therefore every man's hand will be against me."* A belief in Ireland's wrongs was part of the American creed, like the faithlessness of Charles II. and the tyranny of George III. Irish Americans had enormous influence at elections, in Congress, and in the newspapers. Released Fenians, O'Donovan Rossa among them, had been spreading what they called the light, and their own countrymen at all events believed what they said. The American people as a whole were not unfriendly to England. The Alabama Arbitration and the Geneva Award had destroyed the ill feeling that remained after the fall of Richmond. But it was not worth the while of any American politician to alienate the Irish vote, and most Americans honestly thought, not without reason, that the policy of England in Ireland had been abominable. To let sleeping dogs lie might be wise. Once they were unchained, no American hand would help to chain them up again. Froude, however, conceived that circumstances were unusually favourable. The Irish Church had been disestablished, and the Fenian prisoners had been set free. The Irish Land Act of 1870 had recognised the Irish tenant's right to a partnership in the soil. Although Froude had no sympathy, ecclesiastical or political, with Gladstone, he did think that the Land Act was a just and beneficent measure from which good would come. In the firm belief that he could vindicate the statesmanship of his own country before American audiences without sacrificing the paramount claims of truth and justice, he accepted the invitation.

— + Table Talk of Shirley, p. 149. * Table Talk of Shirley, p. 151. —

After a summer cruise in a big schooner with his friend Lord Ducie, whose hospitality at sea he often in coming years enjoyed, Froude sailed from Liverpool in the Russia at the end of September, 1872, with the distinguished physicist John Tyndall. He was a good sailor, and loved a voyage. In his first letter to his wife from American soil he describes a storm with the delight of a schoolboy. "On Saturday morning it blew so hard that it was scarcely possible to stand on deck. The wind and waves dead ahead, and the whole power of the engines only just able to move the ship against it. It was the grandest sight I ever witnessed—the splendid Russia, steady as if she were on a railway, holding her straight course without yielding one point to the sea—up the long hill-sides of the waves and down into the troughs—the crests of the sea all round as far as the eye could reach in one wild whirl of foam and spray. It was worth coming into the Atlantic to see—with the sense all the time of perfect security."

Froude's visit was in one respect well timed. President Grant had just been assured of his second term, and even politicians had leisure to think of their famous guest. He was at once invited to a great banquet in New York, and found himself lodged with sumptuous hospitality in a luxurious hotel at the expense of the Bureau which had organised the lectures. One newspaper quaintly described him as "looking like a Scotch farmer, with an open frank face and calm mild eyes." His History was well known, for the Scribners had sold a hundred and fifty thousand copies. His opinions were of course freely invited, and he did not hesitate to give them. "I talk much Toryism to them all, and ridicule the idea of England's decay, or of our being in any danger of revolution; and with Colonies and India and Commerce, etc., I insist that we are just as big as they are, and have just as large a future before us." Both Froude and his hosts might have remembered with advantage Disraeli's fine saying that great nations are those which produce great men. But the sensual idolatry of mere size is almost equally common on both sides of the Atlantic.

The banquet was given by Froude's American publishers, the Scribners, and his old acquaintance Emerson was one of the company. Another was a popular clergyman, Henry Ward Beecher, and a third was the present Ambassador of the United States in London, Mr. Whitelaw Reid. In his speech Froude referred to the object of his visit. He had heard at home that "one of the most prominent Fenian leaders," O'Donovan Rossa, "was making a tour in the United States, dilating upon English tyranny and the wrongs of Ireland." That Froude should cross the seas to confute O'Donovan Rossa must have struck the audience as scarcely credible, until he explained his mission, for as such he regarded it, by asserting that "the judgment of America has more weight in Ireland than twenty batteries of English cannon." When the Irish had the management of their own affairs, he continued, the result was universal misery. They could not govern themselves in the sixteenth century; therefore they could not govern themselves in the nineteenth. If American opinion would only tell the Irish that they had no longer any grievances which legislation could redress, the Irish would believe it, and all would be well.

Though courteously treated as a representative Englishman, Froude had of course no official position, and he hoped that as a private individual his voice might be heard. But, while there were thousands of native Americans who had no love for their Irish fellow-citizens, there were very few indeed who cared to take up England's case against Ireland. The Democratic party were inclined to sympathise with Home Rule as being a mild form of Secession, and the Republican party did not see why Ireland should be refused the qualified independence enjoyed by every State of the Union. In these unfavourable circumstances Froude delivered his first lecture. He made a good point when he described the Irish peasant in Munster or Connaught looking to America as his natural protector. "There is not a lad," he exclaimed, "in an Irish national school who does not pore over the maps of the States which hang on the walls, gaze on them with admiration and hope, and count the years till he too shall set his foot in those famous cities which float before his imagination like the gardens of Aladdin." Nevertheless he asked his hearers and readers to take it from him that Ireland had no longer any good ground of complaint against the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Independence she could not have, and that not because the interests of Great Britain forbade it, which would have been an intelligible argument, but because she was unfit for it herself.

"If I were to sum up in one sentence the secret of Ireland's misfortunes, I should say it lay in this: that while from the first she has resisted England, complained of England, appealed to heaven and earth against the wrongs which England has inflicted on her, she has ever invited others to help her, and has never herself made an effective fight for her own rights .... A majority of hustings votes might be found for a separation. The majority would be less considerable if instead of a voting-paper they were called to handle a rifle."

To tell Irishmen that they could obtain liberty by fighting for it, and would never get it in any other way, was not likely to conciliate them, or to promote the cause of peace. Froude's appeal to American opinion, however, was more practical.

"The Irishman requires to be ruled, but ruled as all men ought to be, by the laws of right and wrong, laws which shall defend the weak from the strong and the poor from the rich. When the poor peasant is secured the reward of his own labour, and is no longer driven to the blunderbuss to save himself and his family from legalised robbery, if he prove incorrigible then, I will give him up. But the experiment remains to be made."

An example had been set by Gladstone in the Land Act, and that was the path which further legislation ought to follow. So far there would not be much disagreement between Froude and most Irish Americans. Rack-renting upon the tenants' improvements was the bane of Irish agriculture, and the Act of 1870 was precisely what Froude described it, a partial antidote. Then the lecturer reverted to ancient history, to the Annals of the Four Masters, and the Danish invasion. The audience found it rather long, and rather dull, even though Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, Cork, and Limerick were all built by the Danes. But a foundation had to be laid, and Froude felt bound also to make it clear that he did not take the old Whig view of Government as a necessary evil, or swear by the "dismal science" of Adam Smith.

He concluded his first lecture in words which at once defined his position and challenged the whole Irish race. "It was not tyranny," he cried, "but negligence; it was not the intrusion of English authority, but the absence of all authority; it was that very leaving Ireland to herself which she demands so passionately that was the cause of her wretchedness." After that it was hopeless to expect that he would have an impartial hearing. Every Irishman understood that the lecturer was an enemy, and was prepared not to read for instruction, but to look out for mistakes. An article in The New York Tribune, which spoke of Froude with admiration and esteem, told him plainly enough how it would be. "We have had historical lecturers before, but never any who essayed with such industry, learning, and eloquence to convince a nation that its sympathies for half a century at least have have been misplaced .... The thesis which he only partly set out for the night—that the misfortunes of Ireland are rather due to the congenital qualities of the race than to wrongs inflicted by their conquerors—will excite earnest and perhaps bitter controversy." This prediction was abundantly fulfilled, and the controversy spoiled the tour. A friendly and sympathetic journalist questioned Froude's "wisdom in coming before our people with this course of lectures on Irish history ... We do not care for the domestic troubles of other nations, and it is a piece of impertinence to thrust them upon our attention. Mr. Froude knows perfectly well that England would resent, and rightfully, the least interference on our part with her Irish policy or her Irish subjects."

In this criticism there is a large amount of common sense, and Froude would have done well to think of it before. He was not, however, a man to be put down by clamour; he was sustained by the fervour of his convictions, and it was too late for remonstrance. His lectures had all been carefully prepared, and he went steadily on with them. The unusual charge of dullness, which had been made against some passages in his opening discourse, was never made again. The lectures became a leading topic of conversation, and a subject of fierce attack. Without fear, and in defiance of his critics, he dashed into the reign of Henry VIII., "the English Blue Beard, whom I have been accused of attempting to whitewash." "I have no particular veneration for kings," he said. "The English Liturgy speaks of them officially as most religious and gracious. They have been, I suppose, as religious and gracious as other men, neither more nor less. The chief difference is that we know more of kings than we know of other men." Henry had a short way with absentees. He took away their Irish estates, "and gave them to others who would reside and attend to their work. It would have been confiscation doubtless," beyond the power of American Congress, though not of a British Parliament. "If in later times there had been more such confiscations, Ireland would not have been the worse for it." Here, then, Froude was on the side of the Irish. Here, as always, he was under the influence of Carlyle. His ideal form of government was an enlightened despotism, with a ruler drawn after the pattern of children's story-books, who would punish the wicked and reward the good. Froude never consciously defended injustice, or tampered with the truth. His faults were of the opposite kind. He could not help speaking out the whole truth as it appeared to him, without regard for time, place, or expediency. If he could have defended England without attacking Ireland, all would have been well, but he could not do it. For his defence of England, stated simply, was that Ireland had always been, and still remained, incapable of managing her own affairs. "Free nations, gentlemen, are not made by playing at insurrection. If Ireland desires to be a nation, she must learn not merely to shout for liberty, but to fight for it" against a bigger nation with a standing army in which many Irishmen were enlisted. The Irish are a sensitive as well as a generous race; and they feel taunts as much as more substantial wrongs. When the first British statesman of his time, not a Roman Catholic, nor, as the Irish would have said, a Catholic at all, had denounced the upas, or poison, tree of Protestant ascendency, and had cut off its two principal branches, Froude wasted his breath in telling the American Irish, or the American people, that Gladstone did not know what he was talking about. The Irish Church Act, the Irish Land Act, the release of the Fenians, appealed to them as honest measures of justice and conciliation. There was nothing conciliatory in Froude's language, and they did not think it just. From the purely historical point of view he had much to say for himself, as, for instance:

"The Papal cause in Europe in the sixteenth century, take it for all in all, was the cause of stake and gibbet, inquisition, dungeons, and political tyranny. It did not lose its character because in Ireland it assumed the accidental form of the defence of the freedom of opinion."

Perhaps not. Ireland, for good or for evil, was connected with England, and when England was at war with the Pope she was at war with him in Ireland as elsewhere. The argument, however, is double- edged. The Papal cause being no longer, for various reasons, the cause of stake and gibbet, how could there be the same ground for restricting freedom of opinion in Ireland, for passing Coercion Acts, for refusing Home Rule? As Froude himself said, "Popery now has its teeth drawn. It can bark, but it can no longer bite." "The Irish generally," he went on, "were rather superstitious than religious." These. are delicate distinctions. "The Bishop of Peterborough must understand," said John Bright on a famous occasion, "that I believe in holy earth as little as he believes in holy water." Elizabeth's Irish policy was to take advantage of local factions, and to maintain English supremacy by setting them against each other. "The result was hideous. The forty-five glorious years of Elizabeth were to Ireland years of unremitting wretchedness." Nobody could complain that Froude spared the English Government. If he had been writing history, or rather when he was writing it, the mutual treachery of the Irish could not be passed over. "Alas and shame for Ireland," said Froude in New York. "Not then only, but many times before and after, the same plan [offer of pardon to murderous traitors] was tried, and was never known to fail. Brother brought in the dripping head of brother, son of father, comrade of comrade. I pardon none, said an English commander, until they have imbued their hands in blood." The revival of such horrors on a public platform could serve no useful purpose. They could not be pleaded as an apology for England, and they inflamed, instead of soothing, the animosities which Froude professed himself anxious to allay. Yet he never lost sight of justice. On Elizabeth he had no mercy. He made her responsible for the slaughter of men, women, and children by her officers, for first neglecting her duties as ruler, and then putting down rebellion by assassination. The plantation of Ulster by 'James I., and the accompanying forfeiture of Catholic estates, he defended on the ground that only the idle rich were dispossessed. This is of course socialism pure and simple. James I.'s own excuse was that Tyrone and Tyrconnell, who owned the greater part of Ulster between them, had been implicated in the Gunpowder Plot. If they were, the loss of their lands was a very mild penalty indeed.

On the rebellion of 1641, which led to Cromwell's terrible retribution, Froude touched lightly. Although the number of Protestants who perished in the massacre has been exaggerated, the attempts of Catholic historians to deny it, or explain it away, are futile. Sir William Petty's figure of 38,000 is as well authenticated as any. Froude of course justifies Cromwell for putting, eight years afterwards, the garrisons of Drogheda and Wexford to the sword. His characteristic intrepidity was never more fully shown than in these appeals to American opinion against the Irish race and creed. Unfortunately the practical result of them was the reverse of what he intended. He preached the gospel of force. Thus he expressed it in reply to Cromwell's critics: "I say frankly, that I believe the control of human things in this world is given to the strong, and those who cannot hold their own ground with all advantage on their side must bear the Consequences of their weakness." The Holy Inquisition, might have used this language in Italy or in Spain. Any tyrant might use it at any time. It was denied in anticipation by an older and higher authority than Carlyle in the words "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong." There is a better morality, if indeed there be a worse, than reverence for big battalions.

Sceptre and crown Must topple down, And in the earth be equal made With the poor crooked scythe and spade;

Only the actions of the just Smell sweet and blossom in their dust.

Froude seldom did things by halves, and his apology for Cromwell is not half-hearted. He applauds the celebrated pronouncement, "I meddle with no man's conscience; but if you mean by liberty of conscience, liberty to have the mass, that will not be suffered where the Parliament of England has power." A great deal has happened since Cromwell's time, and the mass is no longer the symbol of intolerance, if only because the Church of Rome has no power to persecute. Cromwell would have had a short shrift if he had fallen into the hands of mass-goers. To tolerate intolerance is a Christian duty, and therefore possible for an individual. Whether it was possible for the Lord General in 1650 is a question hardly suited for popular treatment on a public platform. All that he did was right in Froude's eyes, including the prescription of "Hell or Connaught" for "the men whose trade was fighting, who had called themselves lords of the soil," and the abolition of the Irish Parliament. "I as an Englishman," said Froude, "honour Cromwell and glory in him as the greatest statesman and soldier our race has produced. In the matter we have now in hand I consider him to have been the best friend, in the best sense, to all that was good in Ireland." This is of course an opinion which can honestly be held. But to the Irish race all over the world such language is an irritating defiance, and they simply would not listen to any man who used it.

The expulsion of Presbyterians under Charles II. was foolish as well as cruel, for it deprived the English Government in Ireland of their best friends, and supplied the American colonies with some of their staunchest soldiers in the War of Independence. Enough were left, however, to immortalise the siege of Derry, while the native Irish failed to distinguish themselves, or, in plain English, ran away, at the Battle of the Boyne, and the defeat of James II. was recognised by the Treaty of Limerick. An exclusively Protestant, Parliament was accompanied by such toleration as the Catholics had enjoyed under Charles II. The infamous law against the Irish trade in wool and the episcopal persecution of Nonconformists, were condemned in just and forcible terms by Froude. Episcopal shortcomings seldom escaped his vigilant eye. "I believe," he said, "Bishops have produced more mischief in this world than any class of officials that have ever been invented." The petition of the Irish Parliament for union with England in 1703 was refused, madly refused, Froude thought; Protestant Dissenters were treated as harshly as Catholics, and the commercial regulations of the eighteenth century were such that smuggling thrived better than any other trade. The country was pillaged by absent landlords, and "the mere hint of an absentee tax was sufficient to throw the younger Pitt into convulsions." The Irish Protestant Bishops provoked the savage satire of Swift, who doubted not that excellent men had been appointed, and only deplored that they should be personated by scoundrels who had murdered them on Hounslow Heath.

These lectures stung the Irish to the quick, and gave much embarrassment to Froude's American friends. The Irish found a powerful champion in Father Burke, the Dominican friar, who had been a popular preacher at Rome, and with an audience of his own Catholic countrymen was irresistible. Burke was not a well informed man, and his knowledge of history was derived from Catholic handbooks. But the occasion did not call for dry facts. Froude had not been passionless, and what the Irish wanted in reply was the rhetorical eloquence which to the Father was second nature. Burke, however, had the good taste and good sense to acknowledge that Froude suffered from nothing worse than the invincible prejudice which all Catholics attribute to all Protestants. As a Protestant and an Englishman, Froude could not be expected to give such a history of Ireland as would be agreeable to Irishmen. "Yet to the honour of this learned gentleman be it said that he frankly avows the injuries which have been done, and that he comes nearer than any man whom I have ever heard to the real root of the remedy to be applied to these evils." When his handling of documentary evidence was criticised, Froude repeated his challenge to the editor of The Saturday Review, which had never been taken up, and on that point the American sense of fair play gave judgment in his favour. But how was public opinion to pronounce upon such a subject as the alleged Bull of Adrian II., granting Ireland to Henry II of England? The Bull was not in existence, and Burke boldly denied that it had ever existed at all. Froude maintained that its existence and its nature were proved by later Bulls of succeeding Popes. The matter had no interest for Protestants, and the American press regarded it as a bore. Burke had more success with the rebellion of 1641, and the Cromwellian massacres of Such 1649. Such topics cannot be exhaustively treated in part of a single lecture, and Burke could not be expected to put the slaughter of true believers on a level with irregular justice roughly wreaked upon heretics. The combat was not so much unequal as impossible. There was no common groud. Froude could be fair to an eminent especially if he were a Protestant. His panegyric on Grattan deserves to be quoted alike for its eloquence and its justice. "In those singular labyrinths of intrigue and treachery," meaning the secret correspondence at the Castle, "I have found Irishmen whose names stand fair enough in patriotic history concerned in transactions that show them knaves and scoundrels; but I never found stain nor shadow of stain on the reputation of Henry Grattan. I say nothing of the temptations to which he was exposed. There were no honours with which England would not have decorated him; there was no price so high that England would not have paid to have silenced or subsidised him. He was one of those perfectly disinterested men who do not feel temptations of this kind. They passed by him and over him without giving him even the pains to turn his back on them. In every step of his life he was governed simply and fairly by what he conceived to be the interest of his country." Grattan's Parliament, as we all know, nearly perished in a dispute about the Regency, and finally disappeared after the rebellion of 1798. It gave the Catholics votes in 1793, though no Catholic ever sat within its walls. Grattan, according to Froude, was led astray by the "delirium of nationality," and the true Irish statesman of his time was Chancellor Fitzgibbon, Lord Clare, whose name is only less abhorred by Irish Nationalists than Cromwell's own. Americans did not think nationality a delirium, and their ideal of statesmanship was not represented by Lord Clare.

The fifth and last of Froude's American lectures was reprinted in Short Studies with the title of "Ireland since the Union."* It has a closer bearing upon current politics than the others, and it runs counter to American as well as to Irish sentiment. "Suppose in any community two-thirds who are cowards vote one way, and the remaining third will not only vote, but fight the other way." The argument has often been used against woman's suffrage. One obvious answer is that women, like men, would vote on different sides. In a community where two-thirds of the adult male population were cowards problems of government would doubtless assume a secondary importance, and that there are limits to the power of majorities no sane Constitutionalist denies.

— * Vol. ii. pp, 515-598. —

Short of making Carlyle Dictator of the Universe, Froude suggested no alternative to the ballot-box of civilised life. This last lecture, however, is chiefly remarkable for the rare tribute which it pays to the services of the Catholic priesthood. Father Burke himself must have been melted when he read, "Ireland is one of the poorest countries in Europe. There is less theft, less cheating, less house-breaking, less robbery of all sorts, than in any country of the same size in the world. In the wild district where I lived we slept with unlocked door and open windows, with as much security as if we had been—I will not say in London or New York, I should be sorry to try the experiment in either place: I will say as if we had been among the saints in Paradise. In the sixteenth century the Irish were notoriously regardless of what is technically morality. For the last hundred years at least impurity has been almost unknown in Ireland. And this absence of vulgar crime, and this exceptional delicacy and modesty of character, are due alike, to their ever- lasting honour, to the influence of the Catholic clergy." That is the testimony of an opponent, and it is emphatic testimony indeed. To O'Connell Froude is again conspicuously unjust, and his remark that "a few attacks on handfuls of the police, or the blowing in of the walls of an English prison . . . will not overturn an Empire" is open to the observation that they disestablished a Church. When Froude came to practical politics, he always seemed to be "moving about in worlds not realised." His statement that national education in Ireland was the best that existed in any part of the Empire almost takes one's breath away, and the idea that no Irish legislature would have passed the Land Act is a strange fantasy indeed. Whether an Irish Parliament could be trusted to deal fairly by the landlords is an open question. That it would fail to consider the interests of the tenants is unthinkable. Froude was on much firmer ground when he employed the case of Protestant Ulster, the Ulster of the Plantation, as an argument against Home Rule. Those Protestants would, he said, fight rather than submit to a Catholic majority, and England could not assent to shooting them down. There is only one real answer to this objection, and that is that Protestant Ulster would do nothing of the kind. A logical method of reconciling contradictory prophecies has never been found. In 1872 Home Rule had no support in England, and even in Ireland the electors were pretty equally divided. Froude did not lay hold of the American mind, as he might have done, by showing the inapplicability of the Federal System which suits the United States to the circumstances of the United Kingdom.

The impression made by Froude upon his audiences in New York is graphically described by an American reporter.

"Mr. Froude improved very much in delivery and manner during this course of lectures .... In his earlier lectures his ways were awkward, his speech was too rapid, and he did not know what in world to do with his hands. It was quite to see him run them under his coat tails, spread them across his shirt front, stick them in his breeches pockets, twirl them in the arm-holes his vest, or hold them behind his back. He has now found out how to dispose of them in a more or less natural way. His delivery is less rapid, his voice better modulated, and his enunciation more distinct .... One of his most effective peculiarities, in inviting the attention of his hearers, is the exceeding earnestness of the manner of his address. This earnestness is not like that of rant. It is the result of his own strong conviction and his desire to impress others." That is a fair and unprejudiced estimate of Froude as he appeared to a trained observer who took neither side in the dispute. Many Irishmen shook hands with him, and thanked him for his plain speaking. Bret Harte told him that even those who dissented most widely from his opinions admired his "grit." But politicians had to think of the Irish vote, and the proprietors of newspapers could not ignore their Catholic subscribers. The priests worked against him with such effect that Mr. Peabody's servants in Boston, who were Irish Catholics, threatened to leave their places if Froude remained as a guest in their master's house. Father Burke, who had begun politely enough, became obstreperous and abusive. Froude's life was in danger, and he was put under the special protection of the police. The English newspapers, except The Pall Mall Gazette, gave him no support, and The Times treated his enterprise as Quixotic. A preposterous rumour that he received payment from the British Ministry obtained circulation among respectable persons in New York. He had intended to visit the Western States, but the project was abandoned in consequence of growing Irish hostility which made him feel that further effort would be useless. It was not that he thought his arguments refuted, or capable of refutation. He had considered them too long, and too carefully, for that. But the well had been poisoned. The malicious imputation of bribery was caught up by the more credulous Irish, and their priests warned them that they would do wrong in listening to a heretic. As for the American people, they had no mind to take up the quarrel. It was no business of theirs.

Some extracts from Froude's letters to his wife will show how much he enjoyed American hospitality, and how far he appreciated American character. "I was received on Saturday," he wrote from New York on the 4th of October, 1872, "as a member of the Lotus Club—the wits and journalists of New York. It was the strangest scene I ever was present at. They were very clever—very witty at each other's expense, very complimentary to me; and, believe me, they worked the publishers who were present for the profit they were making out of me." He was agreeably surprised by the merchant princes of New York. "There is absolutely no vulgarity about them. They are immensely rich, but simple, and rather elaborately 'religious' in the forms of their lives. A very long grace is always said before dinner. In this and many ways they are totally unlike what I expected." Again, after a description of Cornell's University, he says, "There is Mr. Cornell, who has made all this, living in a little poky house in a street with a couple of maids, his wife and daughters dressed in the homeliest manner. His name will be remembered for centuries as having spent his wealth in the very best institutions on which a country's prosperity depends. Our people spend their fortunes in buying great landed estates to found and perpetuate their own family. I wonder which name will last the longest, Mr. Cornell's or Lord Overstone's." "There is no such thing," he says elsewhere, "as founding a family, and those who save good fortunes have to give them to the public when they die for want of a better use to put them to."

With sincerely religious people, especially if they were Evangelicals, Froude felt deep sympathy. Patronage of religion he detested, most of all the form of it which prescribes religion for other people. An American philosopher called, and told him that, having failed to find a new creed, he thought the old superstitions had better be kept up, Popery for choice. "This," remarks Froude, "is what I call want of faith. If you can believe that what you are convinced is a lie may nevertheless exert a wholesome moral influence on people, and that, whether true or not, or rather though certainly not true, it is good to be preserved and taken up with, you are to all practical purposes an atheist."

While he was at Boston Froude saw a great fire, and his description of it is hardly inferior to the best things in his best books. He was staying with George Peabody, equally well known in England and the United States as a philanthropist, "one of the sweetest and gentlest of beings." "As we were sitting after dinner, the children said there was a fire somewhere. They heard the alarm bell, and saw a red light in the sky. Presently we saw flames. Mr. Peabody was uneasy, and I walked out with him to see. Between the house here and the town lies the Common or City Park. As we crossed this, the signs became more ominous. We made our way into the principal street through the crowd, and then, looking down a cross street full of enormous warehouses, saw both sides of it in flames. The streets were full of steam fire-engines, all roaring and playing, but the houses were so high and large, and the volumes of fire so prodigious, that their water-jets looked like so many squirts. As we stood, we saw the fire grow. Block caught after block. I myself saw one magnificent store catch at the lower windows. In a few seconds the flame ran up storey after storey, spouting out at the different landings as it rose. It reached the roof with a spring, and the place was gone. There was nothing to stop it. Our people were sure that it would be another Chicago. The night was fine and frosty, with a light north-easterly breeze against which the fire was advancing. We stayed an hour or two. There seemed no danger for Mr. Peabody's bank. He was evidently, however, extremely harassed and anxious, as he held the bonds of innumerable merchants whose property was being destroyed. I thought I was in his way, and left him, and came home to tell the family what was going on. After I left the fire travelled faster than ever. Huge rolls of smoke swelled up fold after fold. The under folds crimson and glowing yellow from the flames below, sparks flying up like rocket stars. A petroleum store caught, and the flames ran about in rivers, and above all the steel blue moon shone through the rents of the rolling vapour, and the stars with an intensity of brilliant calm such as we never see in England. It was a night to be eternally remembered."

A great many Irish families were made homeless by this fire, and Froude subscribed seven hundred dollars for their relief, thereby encouraging the rumour that he was in the pay of the British Minister whom he disliked and distrusted most. Froude's final view of America and Americans was in some respects less favourable than his first impressions. He was struck by the difference between their public and private treatment of himself, between their conversation and the articles in their press. "From what I see of the Eastern States I do not anticipate any very great things as likely to come out of the Americans. Their physical frames seem hung together rather than organically grown .... They are generous with their money, have much tenderness and quiet good feeling; but the Anglo- Saxon power is running to seed, and I don't think will revive. Puritanism is dead, and the collected sternness of temperament which belonged to it is dead also."

This language seems strange, written as it was only seven years after the great war. Froude, however, considered that there was much hysterical passion in the policy of the North, and he shared Carlyle's dislike of democratic institutions. Moreover, he was disappointed with the result of his mission. The case seemed so clear to him that he could not understand why it should seem less clear to others. He believed that if the priests could have been driven out of Ireland by William of Orange, the more fanatical Catholics would have followed them, and Ireland would have become prosperous, contented, and loyal. To an American Republican such ideas were as repugnant as they were to an Irish Catholic. An American could understand the argument that Home Rule was impracticable, because a Federal Constitution did not apply to the circumstances of the United Kingdom. He would not readily believe that the Irish were by nature incapable of self-government, or that Englishmen must know better what was good for them than they knew themselves. For Cromwell he could make allowance. The Protector had to deal with a Catholicism which would have made an end of him and restored Charles II. But times had changed. Catholics had abandoned persecution, and ought not to be punished the sins of their fathers. The Irish did not claim, as the Southern States had claimed, the right to secede, but to exercise the powers inherent in every State of the American Union.

Carlyle warmly approved of Froude's undertaking, and persisted in believing that it had done good by forcing the American public to see that there were two sides to the historic question, an English side as well as an Irish one. He was so far right, and with that qualified success Froude had to be content. His champion, whose opinion was more to him than any other, than any number of others, wrote to Mrs. Froude on the 5th of December, 1872: "The rest of the affair, all that loud whirlwind of Bully Burke, Saturday Review and Co., both at home and abroad, I take to be, in essence, absolutely nothing; and to deserve from him no more regard than the barking of dogs, or the braying of asses. He may depend on it, what he is saying about Ireland is the genuine truth, or the nearest to it that has ever been said by any person whatever; and I hope he knows long ere this (if he likes to consider it) that the truth alone is anything, and all the circumambient balderdash and whirlwinds of nonsense tumbling round it are, and eternally remain, nothing. Tell him I have read his book, and know others that have read it with attention; and that their and my clear opinion is as above. To myself there is a ring in it as of clear steel; and my prophecy is that all the roaring blockheads of the world cannot prevent its natural effect on human souls. Sooner or later all persons will have to believe it." Carlyle seldom qualified his approval, and his earnest advocacy was to Froude a recompense beyond all price.

The first volume of Froude's English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, to which Carlyle refers, had been published at home while the author was lecturing on the Irish question to the people of the United States. Like the lectures, on a more thorough and comprehensive scale, it is a bold indictment of the Irish nation. Froude could not write without a purpose, nor forget that he was an Englishman and a Protestant. Before he had finished a single chapter of his new book he had stated in uncompromising language his opinion of the Irish race. "Passionate in everything—passionate in their patriotism, passionate in their religion, passionately courageous, passionately loyal and affectionate—they are without the manliness which would give strength and solidity to the sentimental part of their dispositions; while the surface and show is so seductive and winning that only experience of its instability can resist its charm."* Such summary judgments are seldom accurate. Every one must be acquainted with individual Irishmen who do not correspond with Froude's general description. Nor does Froude always take into account the shrewdness, the humour, the genius for politics, which have distinguished Irishmen throughout the world. Impressed with this view of the Irish character, he held that forbearance in dealing with Irish rebellions was misplaced, that Irishmen respected only an authority with which they durst not trifle, and that universal confiscation should have followed the defeat of Shan O'Neill.

— * Vol. i, pp. 21, 22, —

These, however, were preliminary matters. When he came to the eighteenth century Froude had to consider details, and here his prejudice against Catholicism led him astray. In the reign of George II. acts of lawless violence were not uncommon on this side of the Channel, and Richardson's Clarissa was read with a credulity which showed that abduction could be committed without being followed by punishment. In parts of Ireland it was not an infrequent offence, and Froude collected some abominable cases, which he described in his picturesque way.* As examples of disregard for humanity, and contempt for law, he was fully justified in citing them. But he endeavoured to throw responsibility for these outrages on the Roman Catholic Church. "Young gentlemen," he says, "of the Catholic persuasion were in the habit of recovering equivalents for the lands of which they considered themselves to have been robbed, and of recovering souls at the same time by carrying off young Protestant girls of fortune to the mountains, ravishing them with the most exquisite brutality, and then compelling them to go through a form of marriage, which a priest was always in attendance ready to celebrate."+ This is a very serious charge, perhaps as serious a charge as could well be made against a religious communion. It was an accusation improbable on the face of it; for while the Church of Rome in the course of her strange, eventful history has tampered with the sixth commandment, as Protestants call it, she has never underrated the virtue of chastity, and has always proclaimed a high standard of sexual morals. In his zeal to justify the penal laws against Catholics Froude accepted without sufficient inquiry evidence which could only have satisfied one willing to believe the worst.

— * English in Ireland, vol. i. pp. 417-434. + Ibid., p. 417. —

Several years afterwards, in 1878, the subject was fully discussed, and Froude's conclusions were shown to be unsound, by another historian, William Edward Hartpole Lecky. Lecky was a much more formidable critic than Freeman. Calm in temperament and moderate in language, he could take part in an historical controversy without getting into a rage. Freeman, after pages of mere abuse, would pounce with triumphant ejaculations upon a misprint. Lecky did not waste his time either on scolding or on trifles. The faults he found were grave, and his censure was not the less severe for being decorous. An Anglicised Irishman, living in England, though a graduate of Dublin University, Lecky became known when he was a very young man for a brilliant little book on Leaders of Irish Opinion. He had since published mature and valuable histories of rationalism, and of morals. His History of England in the Eighteenth Century is likely to remain a standard book, being written with fairness, lucidity, and candour. It is true that in his Irish chapters, with which alone I am concerned, Lecky, like Froude, wrote with a purpose. He was an Irish patriot, and bent on making out the best possible case for his own country.

At the same time he was, for an Irishman, singularly impartial between Catholic and Protestant, leaning, if at all, to the Protestant side. Yet he repudiated with indignant vehemence Froude's attempt to connect the Catholic Church with these atrocious crimes. I am bound to say that I think he disproves the charge of ecclesiastical complicity. The evidence upon which Froude relied, the only evidence accessible, is the collection of presentments by Grand Juries, with the accompanying depositions, in Dublin Castle. In the first sixty years of the eighteenth century there were twenty-eight cases of abduction thus recorded. In only four of them can it be shown that the perpetrator was a Catholic and the victim a Protestant. In only one, which Froude has described at much length, did the criminal try to make a Protestant girl attend mass. For one of the cases, which according to Froude went unpunished, two men were hanged. "The truth is," says Lecky, "that the crime was merely the natural product of a state of great lawlessness and barbarism."* These offences have so completely disappeared from Ireland that even the memory of them has perished, and yet Ireland remains as Catholic as ever. Arthur Young, who denounces them as scandalous to a civilised community, does not hint that they had anything to do with religion, nor were they ever cited in defence of the penal code. Froude was led astray by religious prejudice, and forgot for once the historian in the advocate. The penal codes were rather the cause than the effect of crime and outrage in Ireland. By setting authority on one side, and popular religion on the other, they made a breach of the law a pious and meritorious act. The bane of English rule in Ireland at that time was the treatment of Catholics as enemies, and the, Charter Schools which Froude praises were employed for the purpose of alienating children from the faith of their parents. This mean and paltry persecution strengthened instead of weakening the Roman Catholic Church.

— * England in the Eighteenth Century, ii. 365. —

Meanwhile Froude continued his History, and by the beginning of the year 1874 had brought it down to the Union, with which it concludes. No more unsparing indictment of a nation has ever been drawn. Except Lord Clare, and the Orange Lodges, formed after the Battle of the Diamond, scarcely an Irishman or an Irish institution spared. Grattan's Parliament, though it did contain a single Catholic, is condemned because it gave the Catholics votes in 1793. The recall of Lord Fitzwilliam, an Englishman and a Protestant, in 1795, is justified because he was in favour of emancipation. Flood and Curran are treated with disdain. Burke, though he was no more a Catholic than Froude himself, is told that he was not a true Protestant, and did not understand his own countrymen. Sir Ralph Abercrombie was possessed with an "evil spirit," because he urged that rebels should not be punished by soldiers without the sanction of the civil magistrate. His successor, General Lake, who was responsible for pitch-caps, receives a gentle, a very gentle, reprimand.

"The United Irishmen had affected the fashion of short hair. The loyalists called them Croppies, and if a Croppy prisoner stood silent when it was certain [without a trial] that he could confess with effect, paper or linen caps smeared with pitch were forced upon his head to bring him to his senses. Such things ought not to have been, and such things would not have been had General Lake been supplied with English troops, but assassins and their accomplices will not always be delicately handled by those whose lives they have threatened occasionally. Not a few men suffered who were innocent, so far as no definite guilt could be proved against them. At such times, however, those who are not actively loyal lie in the borderland of just suspicion."* That all Irish Catholics were guilty unless they could prove themselves to be innocent is a proposition which cannot be openly maintained, and vitiates history if it be tacitly assumed. Froude honestly and sincerely believed that the Irish people were unfit for representative government. He compares the Irish rebellion of 1798 with the Indian Mutiny of 1857, and suggests that Ireland should have been treated like Oude. Lord Moira, known afterwards as Lord Hastings, and Governor-General of India, is called a traitor because he sympathised with the aspirations of his countrymen. Lord Cornwallis is severely censured for endeavouring to infuse a spirit of moderation into the Executive after the rebellion had been put down. What Cornwallis thought of the means by which the Union was carried is well known. "I long," he said in 1799 "to kick those whom my public duty obliges me to court. My occupation is to negociate and job with the most corrupt people under heaven. I despise and hate myself every hour for engaging in such dirty work, and am supported only by the reflection that without a Union the British Empire must be dissolved." That is the real case for the Union, which could not be better stated than Cornwallis has stated it. Carried by corrupt means as it was, it might have met with gradual acquiescence if only it had been accompanied, as Pitt meant to accompany it, by Catholic emancipation. On this point Froude goes all lengths with George III., whose hatred of Catholicism was not greater than his own. In the development of his theory, he was courageous and consistent. He struck at great names, denouncing "the persevering disloyalty of the Liberal party, in both Houses of the English Legislature," including Fox, Sheridan, Tierney, Holland, the Dukes of Bedford and Norfolk, who dared to propose a policy of conciliation with Ireland, as Burke had proposed it with the American colonies. Even Pitt does not come up to Froude's standard, for Pitt removed Lord Camden, and sent out Lord Cornwallis.

— * English in Ireland, iii. 336. —

It is no disqualification for an historian to hold definite views, which, if he holds them, it must surely be his duty to express. The fault of The English in Ireland is to overstate the case, to make it appear that there was no ground for rebellion in 1798, and no objection to union in 1800. The whole book is written on the supposition that the Irish are an inferior race and Catholicism an inferior religion. So far as religion was concerned, Lecky did not disagree with Froude. But either because he was an Irishman, or because he had a judicial mind, he could see the necessity of understanding what Irish Catholics aimed at before passing judgment upon them. Froude could never get out of his mind the approval of treason and assassination to which in the sixteenth century the Vatican was committed. It may be fascinating polemics to taunt the Church of Rome with being "always the same." But as a matter of fact the Church is not the same. It improves with the general march of the progress that it condemns. Froude fairly and honourably quotes a crucial instance. Pitt "sought the opinion of the Universities of France and Spain on the charge generally alleged against Catholics that their allegiance to their sovereign was subordinate to their allegiance to the Pope; that they held that heretics might lawfully be put to death, and that no faith was to be kept with them. The Universities had unanimously disavowed doctrines which they declared at once inhuman and unchristian, and on the strength of the disavowal the British Parliament repealed the Penal Acts of William for England and Scotland, restored to the Catholics the free use of their chapels, and readmitted them to the magistracy." Toleration was extended to Ireland by giving the franchise to Catholics, and complete emancipation might have followed but for the interference of the king, which involved the recall of Lord Fitzwilliam.

To prevent that calamitous measure no one worked harder than Edmund Burke, whose religion was as rational as his patriotism was sincere. In the last of his published letters, written to Sir Hercules Langrishe, in the year before the rebellion, the year of his own death, he said that "Ireland, locally, civilly, and commercially independent, ought politically to look up to Great Britain in all matters of peace or war; in all those points to be guided by her: and in a word, with her to live and to die." "At bottom," he added, "Ireland has no other choice; I mean no other rational choice." To a Parliamentary Union accompanied by emancipation Burke might have been brought by the rebellion. Protestant ascendency as understood in his time he would always have repudiated, if only because it furnished recruits to the Jacobinism which he loathed more than anything else in the world. He even denied that there was such a thing as the Protestant religion. The difference between Protestantism and Catholicism was, he said, a negative, and out of a negative no religion could be made. To persecute people for believing too much was even more preposterous than to persecute them for believing too little. Protestant ascendency was social ascendency, and had no motive so respectable as bigotry behind it. Burke never conceived the possibility of disestablishing the Irish Church, or even of curtailing its emoluments. He would have been satisfied with a Parliament from which Catholics were not excluded. Froude brushed almost contemptuously aside the theories of an illustrious Irishman, the first political writer of his age, and an almost fanatical enemy of revolution.

Genius apart, Burke was peculiarly well qualified to form an opinion. He knew England as well as Ireland; and imperial as his conceptions were, they never extinguished his love for the land of his birth. He was himself a member of the Established Church, and a firm supporter of her connection with the State. But his wife was a Roman Catholic, and for the old faith he had a sympathetic respect. For the French Directory, with which Wolfe Tone was associated, he felt a passionate hatred of which he has left a monument more durable than brass in the Reflections on the French Revolution, and the Letters on a Regicide Peace. He worshipped the British Constitution with the unquestioning fervour of a devotee, and he had been attacked by the new Whigs in Parliament as the recipient of a pension from the king. The old Whigs, his Whigs, had coalesced with Pitt, and the chief fault he found with the Government was that it did not carry on the French war with sufficient vigour. That Burke should have retained his calmness of mind in writing of Ireland when he lost it in writing of all other subjects is a curious circumstance, But it is a circumstance which entitles him to peculiar attention from the Irish historian. Burke was no oracle of Irish revolutionists. Their hero was his critic, Tom Paine. Yet Froude says that when Burke "took up the Irish cause at last in earnest, it was with a brain which the French Revolution had deranged, and his interference became infinitely mischievous."* As a matter of fact, his interference after 1789 had no result at all. So far as the French Revolution modified his ideas, it made them more Conservative than ever, and his object in preaching the conciliation of Catholics was to deter them from Revolutionary methods.

— * English in Ireland, ii. 214, 215. —

But Burke, like Grattan, was an Irishman, and therefore not to be trusted. If he had been an Englishman, or if he had gloried in the name of Protestant, Froude's eyes would have been opened, and he would have seen Burke's incomparable superiority to Lord Clare as a just interpreter of events. Froude looked at the rebellion and the Union from an Orange Lodge, and his book is really an Orange manifesto. Such works have their purpose, and Froude's is an unusually eloquent specimen of its class; but they are not history, any more than the speech of Lord Clare on the Union, or the Diary of Wolfe Tone. Froude does not explain, nor seem to understand, what the supporters of the Irish Legislature meant. Speaker Foster said that the whole unbribed intellect of Ireland was against the Union. Foster was the last Speaker in the Irish House of Commons. He had been elected in 1790 against the "patriot" Ponsonby, and was opposed to the Catholic franchise in 1793. He was a man of unblemished character, and in a position where he could not afford to talk nonsense. Yet, if Froude were right, nonsense he must have talked. Cornwallis, an Englishman, corroborates Foster; Cornwallis is disregarded. "All that was best and noblest in Ireland" was gathered into the Orange Association, which has been the plague of every Irish Government since the Union. Froude's model sovereign of Ireland, as of England, was George III., who ordered that in a Catholic country "a sharp eye should be kept on Papists," and would doubtless have joined an Orange Lodge himself if he had been an Irishman and a subject. The English in Ireland is reported to have been Parnell's favourite book. It made him, he said, a Home Ruler because it exposed the iniquities of the English Government. This was not Froude's principal object, but the testimony to his truthfulness is all the more striking on that account. Gladstone, who quoted from the English in Ireland when he introduced his Land Purchase Bill in 1886, paid a just tribute to the "truth and honour" of the writer.

If it be once granted that the Irish are a subject race, that the Catholic faith is a degrading superstition, and that Ireland is only saved from ruin by her English or Scottish settlers, Froude's book deserves little but praise. Although he did not study for it as he studied for his History of England he read and copied a large number of State Papers, with a great mass of official correspondence. Freeman would have been appalled at the idea of such research as Froude made in Dublin, and at the Record Office in London. But the scope of his book, and the thesis he was to develop, had formed themselves in his mind before he began. He was to vindicate the Protestant cause in Ireland, and to his own satisfaction he vindicated it. If I may apply a phrase coined many years afterwards, Froude assumed that Irish Catholics had taken a double dose of original sin. He always found in them enough vice to account for any persecution of which they might be the victims. Just as he could not write of Kerry without imputing failure and instability to O'Connell, so he could not write about Ireland without traducing the leaders of Irish opinion. They might be Protestants themselves; but they had Catholics for their followers, and that was enough. It was enough for Carlyle also, and to attack Froude's historical reputation is to attack Carlyle's. "I have read," Carlyle wrote on the 20th of June, 1874, "all your book carefully over again, and continue to think of it not less but rather more favourably than ever: a few little phrases and touches you might perhaps alter with advantage; and the want of a copious, carefully weighed concluding chapter is more sensible to me than ever; but the substance of the book is genuine truth, and the utterance of it is clear, sharp, smiting, and decisive, like a shining Damascus sabre; I never doubted or doubt but its effect will be great and lasting. No criticism have I seen since you went away that was worth notice. Poor Lecky is weak as water—bilge-water with a drop of formic acid in it: unfortunate Lecky, he is wedded to his Irish idols; let him alone." The reference to Lecky, as unfair as it is amusing, was provoked by a review of Froude in Macmillan's Magazine. There are worse idols than Burke, or even Grattan, and Lecky was an Irishman after all.

A very different critic from Carlyle expressed an equally favourable opinion.

"I have an interesting letter," Froude wrote to his friend Lady Derby, formerly Lady Salisbury, "from Bancroft the historian (American minister at Berlin) on the Irish book. He, I am happy to say, accepts the view which I wished to impress on the Americans, and he has sent me some curious correspondence from the French Foreign Office illustrating and confirming one of my points. One evening last summer I met Lady Salisbury,* and told her my opinion of Lord Clare. She dissented with characteristic emphasis—and she is not a lady who can easily be moved from her judgments. Still, if she finds time to read the book I should like to hear that she can recognise the merits as well as the demerits of a statesman who, in the former at least, so nearly resembled her husband."

— * The wife of the late Prime Minister. —

In another letter he says:

"The meaning of the book as a whole is to show to what comes of forcing uncongenial institutions on a country to which they are unsuited. If we had governed Ireland as we govern India, there would have been no confiscation, no persecution of religion, and consequently none of the reasons for disloyalty. Having chosen to set Parliament and an Established Church, and to the lands of the old owners, we left nothing undone to spoil the chances of success with the experiment."

Froude went to the United States with no very exalted opinion of the Irish; he returned with the lowest possible. "Like all Irish patriots," including Grattan, Wolfe Tone "would have accepted greedily any tolerable appointment from the Government which he had been execrating." The subsequent history of Ireland has scarcely justified this sweeping invective. "There are persons who believe that if the king had not interfered with Lord Fitzwilliam, the Irish Catholics would have accepted gratefully the religious equality which he was prepared to offer them, and would have remained thenceforward for all time contented citizens of the British Empire." So reasonable a theory requires more convincing refutation than a simple statement that it is "incredible." Incredible, no doubt, if the Catholics of Ireland were wild beasts, cringing under the whip, ferocious when released from restraint. Very credible indeed if Irish Catholics in 1795 were like other people, asking for justice, and not expecting an impossible ascendency. Interesting as Froude's narrative is, it becomes, when read together with Lecky's, more interesting still. Though indignant with Froude's aspersions upon the Irish race, Lecky did not allow himself to be hurried. He was writing a history of England as well as of Ireland, and the Irish chapters had to wait their turn. In Froude's book there are signs of haste; in Lecky's there are none. Without the brilliancy and the eloquence which distinguished Froude, Lecky had a power of marshalling facts that gave to each of them its proper value. No human being is without prejudice. But Lecky was curiously unlike the typical Irishman of Froude's imagination. He has written what is by general acknowledgment the fairest account of the Irish rebellion, and of the Union to which it led. Of the eight volumes which compose his History of England in the Eighteenth Century, two, the seventh and eighth, are devoted exclusively to Ireland.

After the publication of his first two volumes he made no direct reference to Froude, and contented himself with his own independent narrative. He vindicated the conduct of Lord Fitzwilliam, and traced to his recall in 1795 the desperate courses adopted by Irish Catholics. He showed that Froude had been unjust to the Whigs who gave evidence for Arthur O'Connor at Maidstone in 1798, and especially to Grattan. That O'Connor was engaged in treasonable correspondence with France there can be no doubt now. But he did not tell his secrets to his Whig friends, and what Grattan said of his never having heard O'Connor talk about a French invasion was undoubtedly true.* Froude's hatred of the English Whigs almost equalled his contempt for the Irish Catholics, and the two feelings prevented him from writing anything like an narrative either of the rebellion or of the Union. No other book of his shows such evident traces of having been written under the influence of Carlyle. Carlyle's horror of democracy, worship of force, his belief that martial law was the law of Almighty God, and that cruelty might always be perpetrated on the right side, are conspicuously displayed. If Froude spoke of the Roman Catholic Church, he always seemed to fancy himself back in the sixteenth century, when the murder of Protestants was regarded at the Vatican as justifiable. The Irish rebellion of 1798 was led by Protestants, like Lord Edward Fitzgerald, and free thinkers, like Wolfe Tone. But for the recall of Lord Fitzwilliam, the Catholics would have taken no part in it, and it would not have been more dangerous than the rebellion of 1848. Such at least was Lecky's opinion, supported by weighty arguments, and by facts which cannot be denied. If Froude's reputation as an historian depended upon his English in Ireland, it certainly would not stand high. Of course he had as much right to put the English case as Father Burke had to put the Irish one. But his responsibility was far greater, and his splendid talents might have been better employed than in reviving the mutual animosities of religion or of race.

— * See Froude's English in Ireland, vol. iii. pp. 320, 321; Lecky's History of England, vol. viii. p. 52. —

When Lecky reviewed, with much critical asperity, the last two volumes of Froude's English in Ireland for Macmillan's Magazine* he referred to Home Rule as a moderate and constitutional movement. His own History was not completed till 1890. But when Gladstone introduced his first Home Rule Bill, in 1886, Lecky opposed it as strongly as Froude himself. Lecky was quite logical, for the question whether the Union had been wisely or legitimately carried had very little to do with the expedience of repealing it. Fieri non debuit, factum valet, may be common sense as well as good law. But Froude was not unnaturally triumphant to find his old antagonist in Irish matters on his side, especially as Freeman was a Home Ruler. Froude's attitude was never for a moment doubtful. He had always held that the Irish people were quite unfitted for self-government, and of all English statesmen Gladstone was the one he trusted least. He had a theory that great orators were always wrong, even when, like Pitt and Fox, they were on opposite sides. Gladstone he doubly repudiated as a High Churchman and a Democrat. Yet, with more candour than consistency, he always declared that Gladstone was the English statesman who best understood the Irish Land Question, and so he plainly told the Liberal Unionists, speaking as one of themselves. He had praised Henry VIII for confiscating the Irish estates of absentees, and taunted Pitt with his unreasoning horror of an absentee tax. He would have given the Irish people almost everything rather than allow them to do anything for themselves. In 1880 he brought out another edition of his Irish book, with a new chapter on the crisis. The intervening years had made no difference in his estimate of Ireland, or of Irishmen. O'Connell, who had nothing to do with the politics of the eighteenth century, was "not sincere about repeal," although he "forced the Whigs to give him whatever he might please to ask for,"+ and he certainly asked for that.

— * June, 1874. + English in Ireland, 1881, vol. iii. p. 568. —

That Catholic emancipation was useless and mischievous, Froude never ceased to declare. He would have dragooned the Irish into Protestantism and made the three Catholic provinces into a Crown colony. The Irish establishment he regretted as a badge of Protestant ascendency. But he was a dangerous ally for Unionists. That the government of Ireland by what he called a Protestant Parliament sitting at Westminister, meaning the Parliament of the United Kingdom, had failed, he not merely admitted, but loudly proclaimed. It had failed "more signally, and more disgracefully," than any other system, because Gladstone admitted that Fenian outrages precipitated legislative reforms. The alternative was to rule Ireland, or let her be free, and altogether separate from Great Britain. Neither branch of the supposed alternative was within the range of practical politics. But on one point Froude unconsciously anticipated the immediate future. "The remedy" for the agrarian troubles of Ireland was, he said, "the establishment of courts to which the tenant might appeal." The ink of this sentence was scarcely dry when the Irish Land Bill of 1881 appeared with that very provision. Froude was always ready and willing to promote the material benefit of Ireland. Irishmen, except the Protestant population of Ulster, were children to be treated with firmness and kindness, the truest kindness being never to let them have their own way.

CHAPTER VII

SOUTH AFRICA

Before Froude had written the last chapter of The English in Ireland he was visited by the greatest sorrow of his life. Mrs. Froude died suddenly in February, 1874. It had been a perfect marriage, and he never enjoyed the same happiness afterwards. Carlyle and his faithful friend Fitzjames Stephen were the only persons he could see at first, though he manfully completed the book on which he was engaged. It was long before he rallied from the shock, and he felt as if he could never write again. He dreaded "the length of years which might yet lie ahead of him before he could have his discharge from service." He took a melancholy pride in noting that none of the reviewers discovered any special defects in those final pages of his book which had been written under such terrible conditions. Mrs. Froude had thoroughly understood all her husband's moods, and her quiet humour always cheered him in those hours of gloom from which a man of his sensitive nature could not escape. She could use a gentle mockery which was always effective, along with her common sense, in bringing out the true proportions of things. Conscious as she was of his social brilliancy and success, she would often tell the children that they lost nothing by not going out with him, because their father talked better at home than he talked anywhere else. Her deep personal religion was the form of belief with which he had most sympathy, and which he best understood, regarding it as the foundation of virtue and conduct and honour and truth. He attended with her the services of the Church, which satisfied him whenever they were performed with the reverent simplicity familiar to his boyhood. Happily he was not left alone. He had two young children to love, and his eldest daughter was able to take her stepmother's place as mistress of his house. With the children he left London as soon as he could, and tried to occupy his mind by reading to them from Don Quixote, or, on a Sunday, from The Pilgrim's Progress. To the end of his life he felt his loss; and when he was offered, fifteen years later, the chance of going back to his beloved Derreen, he shrank from the associations it would have recalled.

He took a house for his family in Wales, which he described in the following letter to Lady Derby:

"CROGAN HOUSE, Corwen, June 3rd, 1874.

"I do not know if I told you upon what a curious and interesting old place we have fallen for our retirement. The walls of the room in which I am writing are five feet thick. The old part of the house must have been an Abbey Grange; the cellars run into a British tumulus, the oaks in the grounds must many of them be as old as the Conquest, and the site of the parish church was a place of pilgrimage probably before Christianity. Stone coffins are turned over on the hillsides in making modern improvements. Denfil Gadenis' (the mediaeval Welsh saint's) wooden horn still stands in the church porch, and the sense of strangeness and antiquity is the more palpable because hardly a creature in the valley, except the cows and the birds, speak in a language familiar to me. It was Owen Glendower's country. Owen himself doubtless has many times ridden down the avenue. We are in the very heart of Welsh nationality, which was always a respectable thing—far more so than the Celticism of the Gaels and Irish. We are apt to forget that the Tudors were Welsh." Fortunately a plan suggested itself which gave him variety of occupation and change of scene. Disraeli's Government had just come into office, and with the Colonial Secretary, Lord Carnarvon, Froude was on intimate terms. Froude had always been interested in the Colonies, and was an advocate of Federation long before it had become a popular scheme. As early as 1870 he wrote to Skelton:

"Gladstone and Co. deliberately intend to shake off the Colonies. They are privately using their command of the situation to make the separation inevitable."* I do not know what this means. Lord Dufferin has left it on record that after his appointment to Canada in 1872 Lowe came up to him at the club, and said, "Now, you ought to make it your business to get rid of the Dominion." But Lowe was in the habit of saying paradoxical things, and it was Disraeli, not Gladstone, who spoke of the Colonies as millstones round our necks. Cardwell, the Secretary for War, withdrew British troops from Canada and New Zealand, holding that the self-governing Colonies should be responsible for their own defence. That wise policy fostered union rather than separation, by providing that the working classes at home should not be taxed for the benefit of their colonial fellow- subjects. Lord Carnarvon himself had passed in 1867 the Bill which federated Canada and which his Liberal predecessor had drawn. He was now anxious to carry out a similar scheme in South Africa, and Froude offered to find out for him how the land lay. His visit was not to be in any sense official. He would be ostensibly travelling for his health, which was always set up by a voyage. He was interested in extending to South Africa Miss Rye's benevolent plans of emigration to Canada; in the treatment of a Kaffir chief called Langalibalele; and in the disputes which had arisen from the annexation of the Diamond Fields. Thus there were reasons for his trip enough and to spare. He would, it was thought, be more likely to obtain accurate information if the principal purpose of his visit were kept in the background.

— *Table Talk of Shirley, p. 142. —

There was one great and fundamental difference between the case of Canada and the case of South Africa. Canada had itself asked for federation, and Parliament simply gave effect to the wish of the Canadians. Opinion in South Africa was notoriously divided, and the centre of opposition was at Cape Town. Natal had not yet obtained a full measure of self-government, and the lieutenant-Governor, Sir Benjamin Pine, had excited indignation among all friends of the natives by arbitrary imprisonment, after a mock trial, of a Kaffir chief. Lord Carnarvon had carefully to consider this case, and also to decide whether the mixed Constitution of Natal, which would not work, should be reformed or annulled. A still more serious difficulty was connected with the Diamond Fields, officially known as Griqualand West. The ownership of this district had been disputed between the Orange Free State and a native chief called Nicholas Waterboer. In 1872 Lord Kimberley, as Secretary of State for the Colonies, had purchased it from Waterboer at a price ludicrously small in proportion to its value, and it had since been annexed to the British dominions by the Governor, Sir Henry Barkly. Waterboer, who knew nothing about the value of money, was satisfied. The Orange State vehemently protested, and President Brand denounced the annexation as a breach of faith. Not only, he said, were the Diamond Fields within the limits of his Republic; the agreement between Waterboer and the Secretary of State was itself a breach of the Orange River Convention, by which Great Britain undertook not to negotiate with any native chief north of the River Vaal. Lord Kimberley paid no heed to Brand's remonstrances. He denied altogether the validity of the Dutch claim, and he would not hear of arbitration. By the time that Lord Carnarvon came into office thousands of British settlers were digging for diamonds in Griqualand West, and its abandonment was impossible. Brand himself did not wish to take the responsibility of governing it. But he continued to press the case for compensation, and the British Government, which had forced independence upon the Boers, appeared in the invidious light of shirking responsibility while grasping at mineral wealth. If it had not been for this untoward incident, the Dutch Republics would have been more favourable to Lord Carnarvon's policy than Cape Colony was. The Transvaal was imperfectly protected against the formidable power of the Zulus, and a general rising of blacks against whites was the real danger which threatened South Africa.

That peril, however, was felt more acutely in Natal than in Cape Colony. The Cape had for two years enjoyed responsible government, and its first Prime Minister was John Charles Molteno.

Molteno was not in any other respect a remarkable man. He had come to the post by adroit management of a miscellaneous community, comprising British, Dutch, and Kaffirs. He was personally incorruptible, and he played the game according to the rules. He would have called himself, and so far as his opportunities admitted, he was, a constitutional statesman, justly proud of the position to which his own qualities had raised him, and extremely jealous of interference Downing Street. He had no responsibility, he was never tired of explaining, for the acquisition of the Diamond Fields, and he left the Colonial Office to settle that matter with President Brand. Local politics were his business. He did not look beyond the House of Assembly at Cape Town, which it was his duty to lead, and the Governor, Sir Henry Barkly, with whom he was on excellent terms. His own origin, which was partly English and partly Italian, made it easy for him to be impartial between the two white races in South Africa. For the Kaffirs he had no great tenderness. They had votes, and if they chose to sell them for brandy that was their own affair. Of what would now be called Imperialism Molteno had no trace. He would support Federation when in his opinion it suited the interests of Cape Colony, and not an hour before.

Froude left Dartmouth in the Walmer Castle on the 23rd of August, 1874. He occupied himself during the voyage partly in discussing the affairs of the Cape with his fellow-passengers, and partly in reading Greek. The "Leaves from a South African Journal," which close the third volume of Short Studies, describe his journey in his most agreeably colloquial style. A piece of literary criticism adorns the entry for September 4th. "I have been feeding hitherto on Greek plays: this morning I took Homer instead, and the change is from a hot-house to the open air. The Greek dramatists, even Aeschylus himself, are burdened with a painful consciousness of the problems of human life, with perplexed theories of Fate and Providence. Homer is fresh, free, and salt as the ocean."

No sooner had Froude landed at Cape Town than he began tracing all its evils to responsible government. The solidity of the houses reminded him that they were built under an absolute system. "What is it which has sent our Colonies into so sudden a frenzy for what they call political liberty?" A movement which has been in steady progress for thirty years can scarcely be called sudden, even though it be regarded as a frenzy, and so far back as 1776 there were British colonists beyond the seas who attached some practical value to freedom. A drive across the peninsula of Table Mountain suggested equally positive reflections of another kind. "Were England wise in her generation, a line of forts from Table Bay to False Bay would be the northern limit of her Imperial responsibilities."

This had been the cherished policy of Lord Grey at the Colonial Office, and the Whigs generally inclined to the same view. But it was already obsolete. Lord Kimberley had proceeded on exactly the opposite principle, and Lord Carnarvon's object in Federation was certainly not to diminish the area of the British Empire.

If Froude talked in South Africa as he wrote in his journal, his conversation must have been more interesting than discreet. "Every one," he wrote from Port Elizabeth, on the 27th of September, 1874, "approves of the action of the Natal Government in the Langalibalele affair. I am told that if Natal is irritated it may petition to relinquish the British connection, and to be allowed to join the Free States. I cannot but think that it would have been a wise policy, when the Free States were thrown off, to have attached Natal to them." Lord Carnarvon disapproved of the Natal Government's action, released Langalibalele, and recalled the Lieutenant- Governor. His policy was as wise as it was courageous, and no proposal to relinquish the British connection followed. Froude was a firm believer in the Dutch method of dealing with Kaffirs, and he had no more prejudice against slavery than Carlyle himself. But his sense of justice was offended by the treatment of Langalibalele, and if he had been Secretary of State he would have done as Lord Carnarvon did. With the Boers Froude had a good deal of sympathy. Their religion, a purer Calvinism than existed even in Scotland, appealed to his deepest sentiments, and he admired the austere simplicity of their lives. No one could accuse a Cape Dutchman of complicity in such horrors as progress and the march of intellect. On his way from Cape Town to Durban Froude was told a characteristic story of a Dutch farmer. "His estate adjoined the Diamond Fields. Had he remained where he was, he could have made a large fortune. Milk, butter, poultry, eggs, vegetables, fruit, went up to fabulous prices. The market was his own to demand what he pleased. But he was disgusted at the intrusion upon his solitude. The diggers worried him from morning to night, demanding to buy, while he required his farm produce for his own family. He sold his land, in his impatience, for a tenth of what he might have got had he cared to wait and bargain, mounted his wife and children into his waggon, and moved off into the wilderness." Froude's sarcastic comment is not less characteristic than the story. "Which was the wisest man, the Dutch farmer or the Yankee who was laughing at him? The only book that the Dutchman had ever read was the Bible, and he knew no better."*

— * Short Studies, iii. 497. —

The state of Natal, which was then perplexing the Colonial Office, puzzled Froude still more. Four courses seemed to him possible. Natal might be annexed to Cape Colony, made a province of a South African Federation, governed despotically by a soldier, or left to join the Dutch Republics. The fifth course, which was actually taken, of giving it responsible government by stages, did not come within the scope of his ideas. The difficulty of Federation lay, as it seemed to him, in the native problem.

"If we can make up our minds to allow the colonists to manage the natives their own way, we may safely confederate the whole country. The Dutch will be in the majority, and the Dutch method of management will more or less prevail. They will be left wholly to themselves for self-defence, and prudence will prevent them from trying really harsh or aggressive measures. In other respects the Dutch are politically conservative, and will give us little trouble." If, on the other hand, native policy was to be directed from home, or, in other words, if adequate precautions were to be taken against slavery, a federal system would be useless, and South Africa must be governed like an Indian province.

Pretoria Froude found full of English, loudly demanding annexation. He told them, speaking of course only for himself, that it was impossible, because the Cape was a self-governing Colony, and the Dutch majority "would take any violence offered to their kinsmen in the Republics as an injury to themselves." To annexation without violence, by consent of the Boers, the great obstacle, so Froude found, was the seizure, the fraudulent seizure, as they thought it, of the Diamond Fields. He visited Kimberley, called after the Colonial Secretary who acquired it, "like a squalid Wimbledon Camp set down in an arid desert." The method of digging for diamonds was then primitive.

"Each owner works by himself or with his own servants. He has his own wire rope, and his own basket, by which he sends his stuff to the surface to be washed. The rim of the pit is fringed with windlasses. The descending wire ropes stretch from them thick as gossamers on an autumn meadow. The system is as demoralising as it is ruinous. The owner cannot be ubiquitous: if he is with his working cradle, his servants in the pit steal his most valuable stones and secrete them. Forty per cent of the diamonds discovered are supposed to be lost in this way."* The proportion of profit between employer and employed seems to have been fairer than usual, though it might, no doubt, have been more regularly arranged.

At Bloemfontein Froude called on President Brand, "a resolute, stubborn-looking man, with a frank, but not over-conciliatory, expression of face." Brand was in no conciliatory mood. He held that his country had been robbed of land which the British Government renounced in 1854, and only resumed now because diamonds had been discovered on it. The interview, however, was neither unimportant nor unsatisfactory. It was followed by an invitation to dinner, and frank discussion of the whole subject. So firmly convinced was Froude of the President's good faith and of the injustice done him that he pleaded the cause of the Free State with the Colonial Office, and Lord Carnarvon settled the dispute in a friendly manner by the payment of a reasonable sum.+ But that was not till 1876, after Brand had visited London, and seen Lord Carnarvon himself.

— * Short Studies, vol. iii. p. 537. + 90,000 lbs. —

At the end of 1874 Froude returned to England, and reported to Lord Carnarvon what he had observed. The Colonial Secretary, just, but punctilious, was unwilling to reverse Lord Kimberley's policy, and Froude discovered that party politics, to which he traced all our woes, had much less to do with administration than he imagined. Under the influence of Bishop Colenso, an intrepid friend of the natives, Lord Carnarvon had already interfered on behalf of Langalibalele, but that only involved overruling the Government of Natal. After mature consideration he wrote a despatch to Sir Henry Barkly in which stress was laid upon the importance of arranging all differences with the Orange State. Then he proceeded to the subject of Federation, which was always in his mind and at his heart. Here he unfortunately failed to make allowance for the sensitive pride of Colonial statesmen. He proposed the assemblage of a Federal Conference at Cape Town, at which Froude would represent the Colonial Office. For Cape Colony he suggested the names of the Prime Minister, Molteno, and of Paterson, who led the Opposition.