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'