is
disregarded. "All that was best and noblest in Ireland" was gathered
into the Orange Association, which has been the plague of every
Irish Government since the Union. Froude's model sovereign of
Ireland, as of England, was George III., who ordered that in a
Catholic country "a sharp eye should be kept on Papists," and would
doubtless have joined an Orange Lodge himself if he had been an
Irishman and a subject. The English in Ireland is reported to have
been Parnell's favourite book. It made him, he said, a Home Ruler
because it exposed the iniquities of the English Government. This
was not Froude's principal object, but the testimony to his
truthfulness is all the more striking on that account. Gladstone,
who quoted from the English in Ireland when he introduced his Land
Purchase Bill in 1886, paid a just tribute to the "truth and honour"
of the writer.

If it be once granted that the Irish are a subject race, that the
Catholic faith is a degrading superstition, and that Ireland is only
saved from ruin by her English or Scottish settlers, Froude's book
deserves little but praise. Although he did not study for it as he
studied for his History of England he read and copied a large number
of State Papers, with a great mass of official correspondence.
Freeman would have been appalled at the idea of such research as
Froude made in Dublin, and at the Record Office in London. But the
scope of his book, and the thesis he was to develop, had formed
themselves in his mind before he began. He was to vindicate the
Protestant cause in Ireland, and to his own satisfaction he
vindicated it. If I may apply a phrase coined many years afterwards,
Froude assumed that Irish Catholics had taken a double dose of
original sin. He always found in them enough vice to account for any
persecution of which they might be the victims. Just as he could not
write of Kerry without imputing failure and instability to
O'Connell, so he could not write about Ireland without traducing the
leaders of Irish opinion. They might be Protestants themselves; but
they had Catholics for their followers, and that was enough. It was
enough for Carlyle also, and to attack Froude's historical
reputation is to attack Carlyle's. "I have read," Carlyle wrote on
the 20th of June, 1874, "all your book carefully over again, and
continue to think of it not less but rather more favourably than
ever: a few little phrases and touches you might perhaps alter with
advantage;