est to a few topics--wide ones, to be
sure--seemed to increase the intensity of his devotion to those few;
and thus even the two chief practical interests he had in life
connected themselves with his conception of history. One was the
discharge of his duties as a magistrate in the local government of his
county. While he lived at Somerleaze he rarely missed Quarter
Sessions, speaking seldom, but valuing the opportunity of taking part
in the rule of the shire. The other was the politics of the time,
foreign politics even more than domestic. He was from an early age a
strong Liberal, throwing himself into every question which bore on the
Constitution, either in state or in church, for (as has been said)
topics of the social or economic kind lay rather out of his sphere.
When Mr. Gladstone launched his Irish Home Rule scheme in 1886,
Freeman espoused it warmly, and praised it for the very point which
drew most censure even from Liberals, the removal of the Irish members
from Parliament. He was intensely English and Teutonic, and wished the
Gael to be left to settle, or fight over, their own affairs in their
own island, as they had done eight centuries ago. Even the idea of
separating Ireland altogether from the English Crown would not have
alarmed him, for he did not thank Strongbow and Henry II. for having
invaded it; while, on the other hand, the plan of turning the United
Kingdom into a federation, giving to England, Scotland, Ireland, and
Wales each a local parliament of its own, with an imperial parliament
for common concerns, shocked all his historical instincts.

In 1859 he was on the point of coming forward as a parliamentary
candidate for the borough of Newport in Monmouthshire, and again at
the election of 1868 he actually did stand for one of the divisions of
Somerset, and showed in his platform speeches a remarkable gift of
eloquence, and occasionally, also, of humour, coupled with a want of
those minor arts which usually contribute more than eloquence does to
success in electioneering. I went round with him, along with his and
my friend Mr. Albert Dicey, and few are the candidates who get so much
pleasure out of a contest as Freeman did. He was a strenuous advocate
of disestablishment in Ireland, the question chiefly at issue in the
election of 1868, because he thought the Roman Catholic Church was of
right, and ought by law to be, the national Church there; but no less
decidedly opposed to disestablishment in