tion 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