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 Nonconformist tendencies,’ who plants an industrial colony on the coast of Kerry, and has deep-rooted objections to that illicit trade with France which in the last century was the sole method by which the Irish people were enabled to pay their rents to their absentee landlords.  Colonel Goring bitterly regrets that the Penal Laws against the Catholics are not rigorously carried out.  He is a ‘Police at any price’ man.

‘And this,’ said Goring scornfully, ’is what you call governing Ireland, hanging up your law like a scarecrow in the garden till every sparrow has learnt to make a jest of it.  Your Popery Acts!  Well, you borrowed them from France.  The French Catholics did not choose to keep the Hugonots among them, and recalled the Edict of Nantes.  As they treated the Hugonots, so you said to all the world that you would treat the Papists.  You borrowed from the French the very language of your Statute, but they are not afraid to stand by their law, and you are afraid to stand by yours.  You let the people laugh at it, and in teaching them to despise one law, you teach them to despise all laws—­God’s and man’s alike.  I cannot say how it will end; but I can tell you this, that you are training up a race with the education which you are giving them that will astonish mankind by and bye.’

Mr. Froude’s resume of the history of Ireland is not without power though it is far from being really accurate.  ‘The Irish,’ he tells us, ’had disowned the facts of life, and the facts of life had proved the strongest.’  The English, unable to tolerate anarchy so near their shores, ’consulted the Pope.  The Pope gave them leave to interfere, and the Pope had the best of the bargain.  For the English brought him in, and the Irish . . . kept him there.’  England’s first settlers were Norman nobles.  They became more Irish than the Irish, and England found herself in this difficulty:  ’To abandon Ireland would be discreditable, to rule it as a province would be contrary to English traditions.’  She then ‘tried to rule by dividing,’ and failed.  The Pope was too strong for her.  At last she made her great political discovery.  What Ireland wanted was evidently an entirely new population ’of the same race and the same religion as her own.’  The new policy was partly carried out: