union with the Colonies must come from the
Colonies themselves. The negroes were a difficulty. They were not
really fit for self-government, as the statesmen of the American
Union had found. Personal freedom, the inalienable right of all men
and all women, is a very different thing from the possession of a
vote. As for India, the idea of Home Rule there had receded a long
way into the distance since the sanguine predictions of Macaulay.
Perhaps Froude never quite worked out his conceptions of the federal
system which he would have liked to see. In Australia it would have
been plain sailing. In Canada it was already established. In South
Africa it would have embodied the union of British with Dutch, and
prevented the disasters which have since occurred. In the West
Indies it would have raised problems of race and colour which are
more prudently agitated at a greater distance from the Black.
Republic of Hayti. Imperial Federalists not yet explained what they
would do with India.

Froude neither was nor aimed at being practical politican. His
object, in which he succeeded, was to kindle in the public mind at
home that imaginative enthusiasm for the Colonial idea of which his
own heart was full. Although the measure of Colonial loyalty was
given afterwards in the South African War, the despatch of troops
from Sydney to the Soudan in 1885 showed that ties of sentiment are
the strongest of all. It was those ties, rather than any political
or commercial bond, which Froude desired to strengthen. No one would
have liked less to live in a Colony. Colonial society did not suit
him. Colonial manners were not to his mind. But to meet governing
men, like Sir Henry Norman, a "warm Gladstonian," by the way, was
always a pleasure to him, and as a symbol of England's greatness he
loved her territory beyond the seas.

The Two Chiefs of Dunboy, published in 1889, was Froude's one mature
and serious attempt at a novel. For distinction of style and beauty
of thought it may be compared with the greatest of historical
romances. If it was the least successful of his books, the failure
can be assigned to the absence of women, or at least of love, which
ever since Dr. Johnson's definition, if not before, has been
expected in a novel. The scene is laid in the neighbourhood of his
favourite Derreen, and the period is the middle of the eighteenth
century. The real hero is an English Protestant, Colonel Goring.
Goring "belonged to an order of me