t for
one form of religion against another, but for truth against
falsehood, for earnest belief in divine things against a Church
governed by unbelievers. The Renaissance in its most Pagan form had
invaded the Vatican, and the Vicar of Christ appeared to Luther as
Anti-Christ himself. If Charles V. had been Pope, and Leo X. had
been emperor, we might never have heard of Luther. Froude sincerely
respected Charles V., and held that Protestant historians had done
him less than justice. Although Charles opposed the Reformation, he
opposed it honestly, and his faith in his own religion was absolute.
He was a Christian gentleman. As he entered Wittenberg after the
battle of Mahlberg, some bishop asked him to dig up Luther's body
and burn it. "I war not with the dead," he perhaps remembering the
grand old Roman line:

Nullum cum victis certamen, et aethere cassis.

One valuable truth Froude had learned not from Carlyle, but from
study of the past, and from his own observation at the Cape. "If,"
he wrote in Caesar, "there be one lesson which history clearly
teaches, it is this, that free nations" cannot govern subject
provinces. If they are unable or unwilling to admit their
dependencies to share their constitution, the constitution itself
will fall in pieces from mere incompetence for its duties." A critic
in The Quarterly Review expressed a hope that this would not prove
to be true of India. But Froude was not thinking of India. He had in
his mind the self-governing Colonies, whose fortunes and future were
to him a source of perpetual interest. He loved travel, and as soon
as he had shaken off the burden of Carlyle he took a voyage round
the world, described, not always with topical accuracy, in Oceana.
The name of this delightful volume is of course taken from
Harrington, More's successor in the days of the Commonwealth. The
contents were a characteristic mixture of history, speculation, and
personal experience. Froude had a fixed idea that English
politicians, especially Liberal politicians, wanted to get rid of
the Colonies. Else why had they withdrawn British troops from Canada
and New Zealand? He could not see, perhaps they did not all see
themselves, that to give the Colonies complete freedom, and to
insist upon their providing, except so far as the Navy was
concerned, for their own defence, would strengthen, not weaken, the
tie. In proof of his theory he produced some singular evidence,
comprising one of the strang