on, which compared the
plain living and high thinking of the Scottish Universities with the
expensive and luxurious idleness that he remembered at Oxford.
Froude was delighted with the compliment the students had paid him,
and they were equally charmed with their Rector. In fact, his visit
to St. Andrews produced in 1869 a suggestion that he should become
the Parliamentary representative of that University and of
Edinburgh. But the injustice of the law as it then stood
disqualified him as a candidate. His deacon's orders, the shadowy
remnant of a mistaken choice, stood in his way. Next year, in 1870,
Bouverie's Act passed, and Froude was one of the first to take
advantage of it by becoming again, what he had really never ceased
to be, a layman. As he did not enter the House of Commons, it is
idle to speculate on what might have been his political career.
Probably it would have been undistinguished. He was not a good
speaker, and he was a bad party man. His butler, who had been long
with him, and knew him well, was once asked by a canvassing agent
what his master's politics were. "Well," he said reflectively, "when
the Liberals are in, Mr. Froude is sometimes a Conservative. When
the Conservatives are in, Mr. Froude is always a Liberal." His own
master, Carlyle, had been in early life an ardent reformer, and had
hoped great things from the Act of 1832. Perhaps he did not know
very clearly what he expected. At any rate he was disappointed, and,
though he wrote an enthusiastic letter to Peel alter the abolition
of the Corn Laws, he regarded the Reform Act of 1867 with indignant
disgust.

Froude had a fitful and uncertain admiration for Disraeli. Gladstone
he never liked or trusted, and did not take the trouble to
understand. He had been brought up to despise oratory, he had caught
from Carlyle a horror of democracy, he disliked the Anglo-Catholic
party in the Church of England, and Gladstone's financial genius was
out of his line. The Liberal Government of 1868 was in his opinion
criminally indifferent to the Colonies. An earnest advocate of
Federation, he did not see that the best way of retaining colonial
loyalty was to preserve colonial independence intact. Nevertheless
Froude was a pioneer of the modern movement, still in progress, for
a closer union with the scattered parts of the British Empire. He
feared that the Colonies would go if some effort were not made to
retain them, and he turned over in his mind the vari