The school of political philosophy of which Mr. Froude is an adherent, has, through the writings of Mr. Carlyle and his admirers and imitators, become tolerably familiar to the world. Mankind, according to this scheme of ideas, are resolvable into two races, or orders -those fitted to rule, and those who are only fit to serve. As Mr. Froude puts it," the superior part has a natural right to govern, the inferior part has a natural right to be governed; and a rude but adequate test of superiority and inferiority is provided in the relative strength of the different orders of human beings." Thus stated, the doctrine sounds exceedingly like the simple assertion that might makes right; bu Mr. Froude goes on to say :-" Among wild beasts and savages, might constitutes right. Among reasonable beings, right is for ever tending to create might." This latter phrase is perhaps, for a master of style, a little obscure, but, as we read on, it becomes abundantly evident that, whatever be the precise relation between right and might, in Mr. Froude's philosophy they are in effect convertible terms. The governing castes and nations are invariably "the nobler and wiser sorts of men,"-in which fact consists the justification of their pretensions to fill the part to which they aspirein contrast with "the ignorant and selfish," who "may be and are justly compelled for their own advantage to obey a rule which rescues them from their natural weakness." This, and this only, we are told, is the true principle of nationalities, overriding and subordinating all other grounds of cohesion, such as natural frontiers, race and language. Starting from these premises, it need scarcely be said that Mr. Froude regards political liberty as an ignis fatuus, and representative institutions as elaborate contrivances for conducting nations to perdition. Laws and administration are estimated by him, not according to the historic method with which modern research and philosophy have made us familiar, not with reference to the condition and stage of progress attained by the people amongst whom they exist, but according to an assumed absolute standard of right and wrong. In framing laws for the government of a people, accordingly, the last thing which a politician of Mr. Froude's school would think of attending to, is the traditions, customs, and general state of

civilisation prevailing among the people for whom they are intended. Instead of this, he would proceed to evolve from his moral consciousness those laws of absolute justice which correspond most nearly to the will of the Maker of the Universe, by whom, and not by human suffrage, the code of rules is laid down for our obedience." The true analogy, in short, for human laws, according to Mr. Froude, is— as he is never weary of insisting—that furnished by the physical laws of nature; and to attempt to repeal or modify the legislation of a country in order to adapt it to the changing requirements of a progressive community, is as absurd as it would be for a mechanician to propose to repeal the law of gravitation, or for a painter to seek to alter the laws of perspective, or of light and shade.

Something of this sort, as nearly as I can make it out, is, in faint outline, the political philosophy propounded by Mr. Froude in his new volumes; and what I wish now to consider is, the degree of corroboration furnished to this remarkable speculation by the history of "The English in Ireland," as told by its author. What then has been the character of English rule in Ireland throughout the five or six centuries over which Mr. Froude's survey extends? As he has depicted it-saving only a period of eight years to be presently noticed-it has been a succession of the most enormous blunders incessantly repeated, committed partly through gross ignorance and indifference, partly from an insatiable and grasping selfishness, and ever issuing in the most frightful calamities-an exhibition ad nauseam of the most utter incapacity for government ever furnished by a civilised nation. For a considerable portion of the whole period, indeed, Ireland could scarcely be said to be governed at all. It was simply allowed to drift, with this result, that, after some three centuries of such rule, a hundred thousand families divided Ireland, whose ways of life, and whose notion of the objects for which life was given them, were the ways and notions of savages.”

"It would be more honour to the king," says a writer whom Mr. Froude quotes, "to surrender Ireland altogether, than to suffer his poorer subjects to be so cruelly oppressed by the nobles, and the nobles to be at war with themselves, shedding blood always without remedy." After the period here refer

red to, indeed, some deliberate efforts were made, notably in the reign of James I., to introduce something like law and order into the country, and to start the people on the way they should go. But the failure was always ignominious and disastrous. The settlement of James I. was followed in some twenty years by the rising and massacre of 1641, on which the country fell once more into a condition of utter anarchy, Then came the golden reign of Cromwell-the one oasis, according to Mr. Froude, in the surrounding desert of English misgovernment. "Cromwell alone of all such governors understood the central principle of Irish management." The principle in question is thus described :-" The worst means of governing the Irish is to give them their own way. In concession they see only fear, and those that fear them they hate and despise. Coercion succeeds better they respect a master hand, though it be a hard and cruel one. But let authority be just as well as strong; give an Irishman a just master, and he will follow him to the world's end." (Vol. I. p. 38.)

It may at once be granted that in Cromwell's scheme of Irish policy there are to be found, along with the harsh and bloody lines with which it is scored, those grand features of decision and thoroughness which are characteristic of all that he attempted. But when Mr. Froude calls it a great success in government, an experiment amply justified by the results, he is simply speaking without the data which alone could warrant such language. What are the facts? The entire duration of the Cromwellian settlement in Ireland is comprised within a period of eight years. The rebellion was not finally put down till 1652, and the Restoration came in 1660. The Irish had been crushed with relentless severity. "The waste of life in the war," says Mr. Froude, "compared with the population of the country exposed to its ravages, stands unparalleled in the annals of mankind" (p. 129). Under such circumstances it is not very wonderful that there should have been peace for eight years, nor that-the three most fertile provinces having been given up to English and Scotch immigrants, naturally among the most enterprising of their countrymen-a certain prosperity should in this time have set in. Similar phenomena had been witnessed before, as they have been witnessed

since, in Ireland, at times when, according to Mr. Froude, the misgovernment of the country was extreme. But even during those eight halcyon years the signs were not few or doubtful of the trouble that was impending. A social war had already commenced. Bands of outlaws ravaged the country, plundering and murdering whereever they got the chance. "The colonists found themselves shot at in the woods and fields, and their farmsteads burnt over their heads" (p. 135). And then Connaught still remained—a refuge and centre to which disaffection could securely rally, where the traditions of hatred and revenge would be stored up, and where the native race might bide its time till the season of England's necessity came. "The Cromwellian settlement of Ireland," says Mr. Froude, was infinitely favourable to her future prospects, if the wound, at last cauterized, was never allowed to reopen” (p. 136). There is wonderful virtue in an "if;" but the question is, what were the probabilities that the "if" in this case would be realized? And while the whole question of the permanent results of the Cromwellian settlement thus confessedly hangs on an "if," where is the warrant for describing it as a grand success in government, amply justified by the event? Mr. Froude's opinion upon this point is therefore simply Mr. Froude's opinion, which his readers will accept or reject according to their estimate of his political sagacity.

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Not to dwell on this point, which is after all a mere episode in the general narrative, let us pass to the next great stage in the history of English rule in Ireland-the plan of government adopted after the close of the civil wars under William III. As it affected the Catholics apart from the rest of the population, it was determined mainly by the legislation embodied in the notorious penal code, so long the scandal and by-word of Europe. Mr. Froude is not satisfied with the penal code, but his objection to it is that it was a half-hearted scheme-it did not go far enough. "What was there," he asks, "in the circumstances of Ireland that, when it was once more subdued, the English Government should have hesitated to apply the same rule there which Louis XIV. was finding necessary for France? . . . To call the repression of opinions which had issued so many times in blood and revolt by the name of

religious persecution, is mere abuse of words" (vol. i., pp. 212, 213). Ireland should therefore have been governed as Protestant France was governed after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. "The existence [in France] of Protestant communities was held inconsistent with the safety of the State. Nonconformists were imprisoned, exiled, deprived of their estates, or put to death. No schools or churches were allowed to them to teach their creeds in, not so much as six feet of ground in which their bodies might rest when dead, if they died out of communion with the Church." The English Government ought to have profited by this example, and, mutatis mutandis, have gone and done likewise. Ireland ought to have been dragooned; by which simple but effectual process, Mr. Froude assures us, it would have been possible, "without real injustice, to have made Ireland a Protestant country" (vol. i., p. 209) As it was, however, the English Government, though their conduct fell short of the vigour and thoroughness of the hero of the dragonnades, nevertheless did show what I suppose Mr. Froude would call a commendable desire to do something in the right direction, and the result, as I have just said, was the penal code against the Catholics. There is no need that I should describe this notorious system, which must be familiar to all readers in the pages of Burke. Suffice it to say that by it the Catholics were deprived of the power of purchasing land or of acquiring any lasting interest in land, of entering the professions or the universities, of exercising their religion except by connivance or special indulgence, of educating their children-in short, of all the ordinary rights of citizens while a number of harassing and degrading provisions, with an almost devilish ingenuity, aimed at introducing dissension into families, thus marring also their domestic life. The remaining population, a small minority of the whole, consisted of Protestant Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and other Dissenters. Of these, the Protestant Episcopalians, a minority within a minority, were selected for special favour, and to them was intrusted such political power and privileges as it was the policy of England not to retain in her own hands. Their Church became the Established Church of Ireland; care, however, being taken that all the more lucrative offices should be filled by Eng

lishmen, who, for the most part, lived in their own country, and performed their duties by deputy. The Protestant Nonconformists-in this respect not more fortunate than the Catholics-were, by the Test Act, excluded from municipal functions, and thus from all possibility of influence in the borough elections, while the predominance of landlord power in the counties rendered them equally without influence there. But perhaps the temper of the English governing classes towards the Irish people as a whole is best seen in the commercial legislation of the period. In the time of Charles II. the principal and indeed almost the only external trade of the country was the cattle trade with England. This trade the English Parliament did not hesitate to proscribe by penal statutes; and if this preposterous legislation was soon after repealed, it is at least certain that this course was not adopted from any tenderness for Irish interests. By William III.'s time the woollen trade, an industry singularly suited to the condition of the country, had struck root, and there was every prospect that, if unmolested, it would have rapidly grown into a thriving trade. But English commercial jealousy at once took alarm. The exportation of manufactured woollens from Ireland was absolutely prohibited; that of raw wool was also prohibited, except when sent to the English market.

It was supposed that England would thus at once obtain her raw material cheap and secure a high price for the manufactured article. Under the influence of similar motives Ireland was not permitted to share in the benefits of the navigation laws, the effect of which was to exclude her from all trade with the colonies of Great Britain. It is proper to state that this side of English legislation in Ireland is denounced by Mr. Froude with becoming emphasis. Perhaps the animating spirit of the policy in question has never been more clearly shown than in his description of an incident which occurred in the early part of the eighteenth century.

"The trade in butter and salt meat, which England had graciously consented to leave, with the vast profits to be made out of wool smuggling, tempted alike landholders and leaseholders to stock meadow and mountain with sheep and black cattle. In 1727 the average size of the farms in the three southern provinces ranged from 800 to 1,000 Irish

pulsory idleness encouraged once more in their inherited dislike of labour, and enured to wretchedness and hunger; and, on every failure of the potato crop, hundreds and thousands were starving." (Vol. I., pp. 396, 397.)

To remedy in some degree this state of things, the heads of a Bill were passed through the Irish Houses of Parliament providing that for every hundred acres which a tenant held he should break up and cultivate five; and, as a further encouragement, that a trifling bounty should be offered by the Government on corn grown for exportation. Before this Bill could become law it was necessary that it should obtain the approval of the English Council, and it was sent to England for this purpose. But the Council absolutely rejected the Bill; not at

all, it should be observed, for its violation of any economic principle, the plan proposed being quite in keeping with the prevailing notions on commercial legislation, but for the following reasons, as explained by Mr. Froude.

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'The real motive was probably the same which led to the suppression of the manufactures; the detestable opinion that to govern Ireland conveniently, Ireland must be kept weak...... A motive so iniquitous could not be confessed; but the objections which the Council was not ashamed to allege were scarcely less disgraceful to them. The English manufacturers having secured, as they supposed, the monopoly of Irish wool on their own terms, conceived that the whole soil of Ireland ought to be devoted to growing it." It was pretended that the Irish farmers, forgetting their obligations to England, and wickedly thinking only of their own interests, were diminishing their stock of sheep, breaking up the soil, and growing wheat and barley. The allegation unhappily was utterly untrue. But the mere rumour of a rise of industry in Ireland created a panic in the commercial circles of England; although the

change existed as yet only in desire, and the sheep

farming, with its attending miseries, was increasing rather than diminishing. Stanhope, Walpole, Sunderland, and the other advisers of the English crown, met the overtures of the Irish Parliament in a spirit of settled hostility, and with an infatuation which now appears like insanity, determined to keep closed the one remaining avenue by which Ireland could

have recovered a gleam of prosperity." (Vol. I., pp. 399, 400.)

Eight years passed and then indeed,

"After a famine in which thousands of the peasantry had died, they (the supporters of the measure) did succeed in wringing out of the English Council a consent that the prohibitory clauses in the leases should be cancelled, and that in every farm a certain small portion should be under the plough. After a great potato failure, when the roads were covered with starving beggars, and in every cabin there was one dead or dying, the Irish Parliament at last did at length, in the year 1728, obtain thus much in the way of concession. (Vol. I., P. 403.)

The condition of the people who lived under this enlightened and beneficent rule was, it will readily be believed, not very flourishing. Mr. Froude has gone into great minuteness in depicting it, and has produced a picture of social anarchy and misery which we may hope is a little overcharged. According to him, the habitual occupation of Irishmen, throughout the greater part of the eighteenth century, consisted in crimes of the most horrible kind—murder, arson, and riot, faction fights and duelling, agrarian crimes, smuggling with its attendant

lawlessness, the mutilation of Protestant clergy, the "carding" of tithe-proctors, the abduction and ravishing of women (of which latter offence no less than five highly coloured and sensational pictures are worked out by Mr. Froude in full detail). These were the occupations of their private life and leisure hours. In politics the atmosphere was one of stifling corruption, and the government of the country was only carried on by the systematic bribery of more than half of the two Houses of Parliament.

Such, in its main features, is Mr. Froude's account of the character and effects of English rule in Ireland during the period over which his narrative extends. Comparing it with his philosophy of government, one is led to ask where is the evidence in his story of that "natural right to govern," which he attributes to the English nation, and by which he justifies their dominion in Ireland? Is it to be seen in the "mutilated and miserable" penal code which beggared and degraded the Catholic keeping men alive," says Burke, "only to insult in their persons every one of the rights and feelings of humanity?" in the

masses