from intestine discord than did England in the Wars of the Roses, or Germany in the Thirty Years' War! Dr Smith decides that "there is nothing in the Irish horoscope at the time of the Norman conquest or in any subsequent manifestations to lead us to assume that Irish history without British connexion would have been bright and happy." "Horoscope" is the right word for the purpose of such a sage, in such an undertaking. But it would tax even his gift of sophistry to point to promise of bright happiness in the English horoscope of the tenth century, when the Saxons, turned religious cowards, basely bought off the Danes; or in the twelfth century, under King Stephen, or under King John, or under Richard the Second, or under either Charles or James the Second. With Dr Smith, the wish is father to the thought. And so, while deciding on one page that a federated Ireland is sure still to be united against England, he decides on another that the Irish on the contrary will fight disastrously among themselves. "The torch of intestine discord" will be "re-kindled once more." So that while the rule of the priest is "sinister," the dissension which will destroy it is sinister all the same. Sinister in a sense it may be; but Englishmen ought surely to be the last men to impute intestine discord to other nations as a crime. It is the strict scientific truth that all political progress is made by intestine discord, in England as everywhere else; and when Dr Smith is not bent on making a pariah of the Celt he is lugubrious over the intestine discords of his own race, which point to a social readjustment more profound than the world has ever yet seen. For Irishmen as for Frenchmen and Germans, discord is the natural parent of social progress. The one sort of intestine discord that is incurable and merely ruinous is the discord of a man's reason when divided against itself. Into that discord has fallen the intelligence of Mr Goldwin Smith. He crowns his criticism of the Home Rule principle with the claim that nearly all the "wealth and intelligence" of Ireland are on the side of the old state of things— this after making out that the "Celtic Irish" have no intelligence worth reckoning with, and that it is "Saxon Irish" who lead the "Celtic Irish." When an English intelligence which might be expected to be impartial puts the case thus, the value of the Irish intelligence which joins cause with Irish "wealth may be quickly calculated.

And there is something more amiss in Dr Smith's polemic than even the prejudice and self-contradiction which have been passed under review. The line between passion and disingenuous

ness is deliberately crossed, as it happens, at the very outset of He begins:

his essay.

"It is proposed that Celtic and Catholic Ireland shall be made a separate nation with a Parliament of its own, and that into this nation Saxon and Protestant Ulster shall, against its will and in spite of its passionate appeals to the honour of the British people, be forced."

What are the facts? Many Home Rulers, recognising the Ulster difficulty, have proposed to meet it. Among other schemes, one has been broached for the erection of Protestant Ulster into a separate State with a separate Parliament, to stand in the same relation as that of Catholic Ireland with the future Federal Parliament. And how was this suggestion met? By loud Ulsterical protests that Ulster would never abandon the scattered Protestants of Southern Ireland; that she would share their fate, whatever it might be. After this, the initial statement of Dr Smith is a specific imposture, sought to be palmed off on the whole Englishspeaking world. There is a limit to the toleration of false witness in the name of Saxonism and Protestantism and Ulsteria. The Ulsterite may, if he likes, demand separate treatment: he may not go on protesting that he is denied separate treatment when he has expressly refused to accept such treatment. If we are to infer Ulster character from Ulster symptoms, in Dr Smith's fashion, we shall be tempted to decide that the man of Ulster is typically a blatherskite and a braggart, and that the truth is not in him, whatever else may be. At present his main function is to help the cause of the Catholic South by showing how much more brutal and fanatical and hysterical a Protestant may be than a Catholic. But even he, scientifically considered, is capable of improvement, like other people.

VIII.

MR FROUDE ON IRELAND.1

A MORE interesting question for a literary plebiscitum than a good many that have been propounded would be this, Who is the most mischievous English writer of the day? I cannot pretend to guess how the decision of the majority would be likely to go, but I should have little hesitation in casting my own vote for Mr James Anthony Froude. That is a grave thing for a conscientious person, however obscure, to say of anybody else; but fairly weighty reasons can be given in this case in support of the charge. Let the reader ask himself concerning Mr Froude's last three books, say, what is their aim, what kind of counsel they give on the social problems of the age, and what kind of effect they are likely to have on political thought and action; and unless he happens to belong to the Bismarckian school he will find it hard to give answers that will sound eulogistic. Oceana was a sample of the higher book-making that gave painful proof of the extent to which literary faculty can be turned to evil purposes. Written with abundant fluency and vivacity, it secured attention for a set of fractious sentiments unconnected by any statable theory, undignified even by a stedfast misanthropy, but breathing at best a pessimism never far from commonplace literary spleen. Go to that book for light on imperial policy, for calm analysis, for wise forecast, and you find instead the wavering marsh-lights of an insincere and theatrical unbelief in humanity, dashed by the gusty empiricism of the mess-room. But Mr Froude, all the same, is a brilliant writer; his book sold very widely, its facile rhetoric putting no strain on any man's

1 This article, written in Mr Froude's lifetime (1889), is left in the present tense, because the writer could not well put the same stress of criticism in a retrospective discussion of a dead man's work as he could in a censure which the subject was alive to answer; though he has no doubt as to the strict justice of all the blame passed.

thinking power; and so we got next The English in the West Indies, or the Bow of Ulysses. The sort of political wisdom communicated by that book can be conveniently sampled by the passage which explains the sub-title :

"I do not believe in the degeneracy of our race. I believe the present generation of Englishmen to be capable of all that their fathers were, and possibly of more; but we are just now in a moulting state, and are sick while the process is going on. Or to take another metaphor. The bow of Ulysses is unstrung. The worms have not eaten into the horn or the moths injured the string, but the owner of the house is away and the suitors of Penelope Britannia consume her substance, rivals of one another, each caring only for himself, but with a common heart in evil. They cannot string the bow. Only the true lord and master can string it, and in due time he comes, and the cord is stretched once more upon the notch, singing to the touch of the finger with the sharp note of the swallow; and the arrows fly to their mark in the breasts of the pretenders, while Pallas Athene looks on approving from her coign of vantage.” 1

I will not here pause to analyse Mr Froude's precious metaphor, in which Penelope and Ulysses may each be Britain, the suitors being portions thereof, or Ulysses may be the coming dictator of the Carlyle-Froude gospel. Nor is it necessary to ask what Mr Froude exactly means by the shooting of the pretenders. What is worth doing is to note first what sheer claptrap is the whole passage, and, second, how perfectly boyish is the political philosophy which the historian thus lays down for us in his old age. He has never outgrown the schoolboy conception of his nation as being an ideal aggregate existing for the purpose of attaining corporate glory either by war or by simple bigness. The nation as a concrete aggregate in which the multitude are crushed by joyless toil, while the few live in varying degrees of idleness and sensual luxury—this he cannot see, though the voice of it goes before his face, 'steaming up, a lamentation, and an ancient tale of wrong." It is the barest justice to Carlyle to say

that he never sunk to such hebetude as this. He could see that the modern problem of England is not the maintaining of a vaporous glory-of that prestige which, as he pointed out, etymologically meant a lie. He saw and taught that the problem was the actual lot of the men and women who make up England —their relation to each other, as rich and poor, workers and idlers, governors and governed. Not in his last senility could he have penned the fustian of his disciple.

1 Pp. 15, 16.

And yet Mr Froude does catch a glimpse of the truth after all, only in order to read it backwards and add positive to negative folly. "Perhaps," he decides in conclusion,

"Perhaps if we look to the real origin of all that has gone wrong with us... we shall find it in our own distractions, in the form of government which is fast developing into a civil war under the semblance of peace, where party is more than country, and a victory at the hustings over a candidate of opposite principles more glorious than a victory in the field over a foreign foe. Society in republican Rome was so much interested in the faction fights of Clodius and Milo that it could hear with apathy of the destruction of Crassus and a Roman army. The senate would have sold Cæsar to the Celtic chiefs in Gaul, and the modern English enthusiast would disintegrate the British Islands (!) to purchase the Irish vote. Till we can rise into some nobler sphere of thought and conduct we may lay aside the vision of a confederated empire."

Thus deeply can Mr Froude see into the riddle of his generation, with the history of Rome to help him. After a special study of the fall of the Republic, he cannot tell that the real cause of that was the collapse of Republican society by its dissolution into two groups of iniquitously rich and hopelessly poor. For him, transcendental to the last, the cause was simply low "ideals" of thought and conduct, and his prescription to his time is just to get high ideals. And the high ideals are to be— what? Aspirations, not for the dignifying of individual and national life in itself by removing squalid misery and idle wealth, but for "the vision of a confederated empire," and for "victory in the field over a foreign foe." Is it worth while to reply to such a prophet of the music-halls that a victory of ideas is as much more glorious than victory in a field of carnage, as the ideal of the civilised thinker is better than that of the Pawnee?

From a book so begun and so ended, what good to mankind can come ? We do not even have facts that we can trust in regard to the things Mr Froude professes to have studied in the West Indies. After reading Mr Salmon on the "Caribbean Confederation," one feels that the historian is as little trustworthy in West Indian matters as scholars have proved him to be in the affairs of ancient Rome; and his name appears to be becoming literally a byword in the Indies and Australia for hasty and baseless statement.1 But Mr Froude's vivacity of style continues

1 Some reader in the British Museum, zealous for truth but oblivious of the rules of the library, has made a terse comment on the margin of its copy of The English in the West Indies. In his account of Trinidad (p. 63) Mr