Yes; he was very honest; he would paint England as black as she deserved.  He said of Queen Elizabeth that she failed in her duty as a magistrate; she failed towards Ireland in her capability of being a great ruler.  And then he proceeded, after passing sentence, to give us the history of her reign, and showed that, in very many cases, she could not have done any different.  For instance—­oh! it is the saddest, blackest, most horrible statement of all history; it makes you doubt the very possibility of human nature—­when you read that Spenser, the poet, who had the most ardent, most perfect ideas in English poetry—­Spenser sat at the council board that ordered the wholesale butchery of a Spanish regiment captured in Ireland, and, to execute the order, he chose Sir Walter Raleigh, the scholar, the gentleman, the poet, the author, and the most splendid Englishman of his age!  And Norris, a captain under Sidney, in whose veins flowed the blood of Sir Philip, writing home to Elizabeth, begs and persuades her to believe in O’Neill’s crimes, and asks for leave to send a hired man to poison him!  And the Virgin Queen makes no objection!  Mr. Froude quotes a letter from Captain Norris, in which he states that he found himself in an island where five hundred Irish (all women and children; not a man among them) had taken refuge from the war; and he deliberately butchered every living soul!  And Queen Elizabeth, in a letter still extant, answers by saying:  ’Tell my good servant that I will not forget his good services.’  He tells us that ’The English nobility and gentry would take a gun as unhesitatingly as a fowler, and go out to shoot an Irishman as an Indian would a buffalo.’  Then he tells us, with amazement, that you never could make an Irishman respect an Englishman!  He points to some unhappy Kildare, the sole relic of a noble house, whose four uncles were slaughtered in cold blood—­that is the only word for this kind of execution, slaughtered—­and he, left alone, a boy, grows up characterless and kills an archbishop.  Every impetuous, impatient act is dragged before the prejudiced mind.  But when Mr. Froude is painting Sir Walter and Spenser, blind no longer, he says:  ’I regret—­it is very sad to think—­that such things should ever have been!’”

Such was the cup from which Ireland drank even into the days of men now living.  Nor was this all.  The rise of English manufactures brought a new chapter of woes to Ireland.  The Irish cattle trade had been killed by an Act of Charles II. for the benefit of English farmers.  The Irish then took up the raising of wool and woolen manufactures.  A flourishing trade grew up.  An English law destroyed it.  In succession the same greed killed the cotton, the glovemaking, the glassmaking, and the brewing trades.  These were reserved for the English maker and merchant.  These crimes upon Irish industry surpassed a thousand-fold the later English attempts upon the industries of the American colonies.