Of course these sweeping admissions are sweepingly contradicted in other parts of the book, where it occurs to Mr Froude to assert that " England" as a whole is naturally just in her disposition towards weaker States in her grasp :

"Everything which she [England] most valued for herself-her laws, and liberties, her orderly and settled government, the most ample security for person and property-England's first desire was to give to Ireland in fullest measure. The temper in which she was met exasperated her into hardness and cruelty . . . till it seemed at last as if no solution of the problem were possible save the destruction or expulsion of a race which appeared incurable." 1

Against this it is sufficient to place the previous quotations, with, say, Mr Froude's admission in his novel (p. 159) as to the insane iniquity of "England" towards the English planted in Ireland:

"When the last rebellion was crushed, Ireland was a sheet of paper on which England might have written what character she pleased. Like a wanton child with a toy, she had no sooner accomplished her long task than she set herself to work to spoil it again. She destroyed the industries of her colonists by her trade laws. She set her Bishops to rob them of their religion."

So that Mr Froude, the most destructive opponent of Mr Froude, recognises with his usual versatility that England, even in recent centuries, has seemed more incapable of rational justice to affiliated communities outside of her own borders than any State since the time of Carthage. Still the see-saw goes on:

"Were England, even now at this eleventh hour, to say that she recognised the state of Ireland to be a disgrace to her, that . . . the constitution would be suspended, and that the three southern provinces would for half a century be governed by the Crown, the committee of the Land League are well aware that without a shot being fired in the field their functions would be at an end." 2

Much virtue in an "if." We are seeing at present how it serves to half suspend the constitution; and the effect on Irish discontent is not hard to discover. It does not tend to satisfy Mr Froude. The prescription is that "England," the hypothetical national unit of one mind, bent on acting towards outsiders as a master or officer towards his subordinates, is simply to forget that she is herself the scene of a struggle of the poor against the rich, and of a progressive democratism, and is to 2 English in Ireland, iii. 583.

1 Id., i. 14.

make believe to be a good healthy Oriental despotism. Of course the accommodating Mr Froude admits that there is no more practical meaning in this than in his other generalisations; so we get this final double somersault;

...

"But I am told that it is impossible. . . . Despotism is out of date. We can govern India; we cannot govern Ireland. Be it so." [Weeps.] "Then let Ireland be free." [After all these volumes.] "She is miserable because she is unruled. We might rule her, but we will not " [wilful "we," "thirty millions, mostly fools"], "lest our arrangements at home might be interfered with. In an independent Ireland the ablest and strongest would come to the front, and the baser elements be crushed. The state of things which would ensue would not be satisfactory to us [strange to say, "we" don't want the best in Ireland to get uppermost, and the worst undermost !] "but at least there would be no longer the inversion of the natural order which is maintained by the English connection, and the compelled slavery of education and intelligence" [alias, absentee landlords] "to the numerical majority. This too is called impossible—yet if we will neither rule Ireland nor allow the Irish to rule themselves, nature and fact may tell us that whether we will or no, an experiment which has lasted for seven hundred years shall be tried no longer.”1

--World without end, Amen! It is a free country, and you may hold about Ireland whatever opinion you please, even as Mr Froude thinks everything he pleases, that is to say, everything by turns and nothing long.

4.

Is it possible, one asks, to regard with any respect an empiric of this kind? One says once more that there was never a more flagrant case of saddling the wrong horse than the proceeding of holding up as Mr Froude's principal literary misdeed his publication of the Carlyle documents. There, with of course his usual frailty in detail, he was helping the world to some truth: in his own books, expressing his own message, he is a perpetual influence for moral darkness. Any reader who peruses Mr Froude without arriving at a clear view of his mischievousness is either demoralised by his contagious confusion or hardened by him in similar empiricism and prejudice. It was truly said of him long ago that his historic researches on Ireland only opened up an old wound, for he went to work with a view, not to calmly 1 Pp. 584-5.

showing that in the past both sides had been brutal, wicked, and mad, but to showing contemporaries how much reason they had to harbour old grudges. A man of his temper, whose convictions are sentiments and whose sentiments are moods, could only work on mood and sentiment, zealously reminding Protestants of the massacre of 1641, and anon reminding Catholics of Protestant tyranny, and leaving them recriminating, without a hint that the true lesson of the past was that we should turn our back on it and bring cool reason to bear on the present. His own leading quality is just that which he is always condemning in the Irish race, infirmity of purpose;1 and he covers it with just the bluster that he attributes to them as constitutional. Condemning their racial vanity, he displays his own in claptrap worthy of a schoolboy, intimating that "Englishmen are not easily frightened at the sound of danger," and so forth.

And withal, when challenged, as he was by Father Burke in New York in 1872, he affects the bon enfant and claims to be himself a warm friend of Ireland. As thus:

"I have been accused of having nothing practical to propose for Ireland. I have something extremely practical. I want to see the peasants taken from under the power of their landlords, and made answerable to no authority but the law. It would not be difficult to define for what offence a tenant might be legally deprived of his holding. He ought not to be dependent on the caprice of any individual man. If Father Burke and his friends will help in that way, instead of agitating for a separation from England, I would sooner find myself working with him than against him." 3

That was sixteen years ago. And in the interval Mr Froude's whole pernicious influence has gone to inflame the dogged and stupid English obstinacy that has at length made Home Rule a necessity and a certainty; Liberal and Tory leaders equally leading up to the issue, and the Liberal only saving appearances. at the last moment by suddenly turning a somersault without a warning to the bewildered multitude.

1 Curiously enough he has developed a tendency to the so-called Irish "bull." As here: "Two of the boats chosen were the fastest the Colonel had. . . . The third was smaller and lighter, and was the swiftest of the three" (Two Chiefs of Dunboy, pp. 186-7).

2 Two Chiefs, p. 185.

3 Lecture in answer to Father Burke, New York, December 1st, 1872: printed in Froude's Crusade. Both Sides. New York, 1873, p. 35.

IX.

MR BALFOUR ON IRISH CIVILISATION.1

A GOOD deal of cross-swearing goes on over the question of the condition of Ireland before the English Conquest, and the precise effect of English rule in checking Irish civilisation. In his recent speech in the House of Commons,2 Mr Davitt made the often-repeated remark that Ireland was a Christian country with a high civilisation while England was in a state of heathen barbarism. This is one extreme in the clash of sweeping assertions. A little reflection might show Irish patriots that if Ireland was thus civilised while England was barbarous, Ireland must of her own nature have retrograded before the Conquest of Ireland under Henry II. It is true, nevertheless, that before the conquest Ireland was in parts much richer and happier than it has been during more than one long and frightful period under English rule; and it is this fact that English Tories sedulously ignore. The extreme of false history on their side is reached in Mr Balfour's speech on the second reading of the Home Rule Bill in the House, on the night of the division. Among other things he said:

66

He had not been indisposed to admit that in the history of Ireland, England had often played a sorry part; but he did not admit that in the great tragedy extending over all these centuries England had been the villain of the piece. (Hear, hear.) It was not true. He felt disgusted at the creeping hypocrisy—when it was not ignorance-(hear, hear) which threw upon this country, and this country above all, the responsibility or more than half the responsibility for Irish ills. The Prime Minister was fond of quoting the opinion of the civilised world. The civilised world took its opinion, with other sources, from the speeches of English politicians; and if English politicians went about abusing England-(loud Opposition cheers)—no wonder that foreign writers, unaccustomed to our peculiar method of political controversy,

1 Written in May, 1893.

2 March or April, 1893.

3 1893.

took English politicians at their word. (Opposition cheers.) What was the fact? Before the English power went to Ireland, Ireland was a collection of tribes waging constant and internecine warfare. All law, all civilisation in Ireland was the work of England. (Opposition cheers, and Nationalist cries of 'Oh,' and laughter. An Hon. Member: 'Destruction.') The perfect unity that Ireland now enjoyed was also the work of England, and the Parliament which Ireland desired to have restored to her-what was that but the work of England?"

There is certainly a good deal of creeping hypocrisy in England; and there is also a fair amount of perpendicular misstatement. Mr Balfour affects both methods. It is easy to say that before the conquest Ireland was a scene of internecine war. So was Scandinavia at the same or an earlier period. So was England before the Danish and again before the Norman Conquest. Then does England owe all its civilisation to the Danes and Normans? Is it not reasonable to surmise that Ireland would have reached some sort of law and order as other countries were doing, if only she had been left to work out her own salvation? There as elsewhere a strong central power would tend to arise in the ordinary course of military evolution. If this be denied by

Mr Balfour's party, as they are wont to deny every reasonable sociological proposition as to the potentialities of the Irish people, let them turn to the authority of one of the few eminent students of political science on their own side. It is the anti-democratic Sir Henry Sumner Maine, of Tory and legalist memory, who writes:

"The Anglo-Norman settlement on the east coast of Ireland acted like a running sore, constantly irritating the Celtic regions beyond the Pale, and deepening the confusion which prevailed there. If the country had been left to itself, one of the great Irish tribes would almost certainly have conquered the rest. All the legal ideas which, little conscious as we are of the source, come to us from the existence of a strong central government, lending its vigour to the arm of justice, would have made their way into the Brehon law; and the gap between the alleged civilisation of England and the alleged barbarism of Ireland during much of their history, which was in reality narrower than is commonly supposed, would have almost wholly disappeared." 1 All that can be urged in rebuttal of this is that the Danish cities constituted already an open sore; and that they had set up an

1 Early History of Institutions, pp. 54, 55.