nce passed away. An entirely new
factor has appeared in the social development of the country, and this
factor is the Irish-American and his influence. To mature its powers, to
concentrate its actions, to learn the secret of its own strength and of
England's weakness, the Celtic intellect has had to cross the Atlantic.
At home it had but learned the pathetic weakness of nationality; in a
strange land it realised what indomitable forces nationality possesses.
What captivity was to the Jews, exile has been to the Irish. America and
American influence has educated them. Their first practical leader is an
Irish-American.

But while Mr. Froude's book has no practical relation to modern Irish
politics, and does not offer any solution of the present question, it has
a certain historical value. It is a vivid picture of Ireland in the
latter half of the eighteenth century, a picture often false in its
lights and exaggerated in its shadows, but a picture none the less. Mr.
Froude admits the martyrdom of Ireland but regrets that the martyrdom was
not more completely carried out. His ground of complaint against the
Executioner is not his trade but his bungling. It is the bluntness not
the cruelty of the sword that he objects to. Resolute government, that
shallow shibboleth of those who do not understand how complex a thing the
art of government is, is his posthumous panacea for past evils. His
hero, Colonel Goring, has the words Law and Order ever on his lips,
meaning by the one the enforcement of unjust legislation, and implying by
the other the suppression of every fine national aspiration. That the
government should enforce iniquity and the governed submit to it, seems
to Mr. Froude, as it certainly is to many others, the true ideal of
political science. Like most penmen he overrates the power of the sword.
Where England has had to struggle she has been wise. Where physical
strength has been on her side, as in Ireland, she has been made unwieldy
by that strength. Her own strong hands have blinded her. She has had
force but no direction.

There is, of course, a story in Mr. Froude's novel. It is not simply a
political disquisition. The interest of the tale, such as it is, centres
round two men, Colonel Goring and Morty Sullivan, the Cromwellian and the
Celt. These men are enemies by race and creed and feeling. The first
represents Mr. Froude's cure for Ireland. He is a resolute 'Englishman,
with strong Noncon