oubly
repudiated as a High Churchman and a Democrat. Yet, with more
candour than consistency, he always declared that Gladstone was the
English statesman who best understood the Irish Land Question, and
so he plainly told the Liberal Unionists, speaking as one of
themselves. He had praised Henry VIII for confiscating the Irish
estates of absentees, and taunted Pitt with his unreasoning horror
of an absentee tax. He would have given the Irish people almost
everything rather than allow them to do anything for themselves. In
1880 he brought out another edition of his Irish book, with a new
chapter on the crisis. The intervening years had made no difference
in his estimate of Ireland, or of Irishmen. O'Connell, who had
nothing to do with the politics of the eighteenth century, was "not
sincere about repeal," although he "forced the Whigs to give him
whatever he might please to ask for,"+ and he certainly asked for
that.

--
* June, 1874.
+ English in Ireland, 1881, vol. iii. p. 568.
--

That Catholic emancipation was useless and mischievous, Froude never
ceased to declare. He would have dragooned the Irish into
Protestantism and made the three Catholic provinces into a Crown
colony. The Irish establishment he regretted as a badge of
Protestant ascendency. But he was a dangerous ally for Unionists.
That the government of Ireland by what he called a Protestant
Parliament sitting at Westminister, meaning the Parliament of the
United Kingdom, had failed, he not merely admitted, but loudly
proclaimed. It had failed "more signally, and more disgracefully,"
than any other system, because Gladstone admitted that Fenian
outrages precipitated legislative reforms. The alternative was to
rule Ireland, or let her be free, and altogether separate from Great
Britain. Neither branch of the supposed alternative was within the
range of practical politics. But on one point Froude unconsciously
anticipated the immediate future. "The remedy" for the agrarian
troubles of Ireland was, he said, "the establishment of courts to
which the tenant might appeal." The ink of this sentence was
scarcely dry when the Irish Land Bill of 1881 appeared with that
very provision. Froude was always ready and willing to promote the
material benefit of Ireland. Irishmen, except the Protestant
population of Ulster, were children to be treated with firmness and
kindness, the truest kindness being never to let them have their own
way.

CHAPTER VII

SOUTH