While Father Burke was in New York Mr. Froude came there, having been invited to deliver before a Protestant Literary Association a series of lectures upon the history of Ireland.  My personal relations with Mr. Froude, I should say here, and my esteem for his rare abilities, go back to the days of the Nemesis of Faith, and I did not affect to disguise from him the regret with which I learned his errand to the New World.  That his lectures would be brilliant, impressive, and interesting, was quite certain; but it was equally certain, I thought, that they would do a world of mischief, by stirring up ancient issues of strife between the Protestant and the Catholic populations of the United States.

That they would be answered angrily, indiscreetly, and in a fashion to aggravate prejudices which ought to be appeased on both sides of the questions involved, was much more than probable.  All this accordingly I urged upon Father Burke, begging him to find or make time in the midst of his engrossing duties for a systematic course of lectures in reply.  What other men would surely say in heat and with virulence would be said by him, I knew, temperately, loftily, and wisely.  Three strenuous objections he made.  One was that his work as a Catholic missionary demanded all his thought and all his time; another that he was not historically equipped to deal with so formidable an antagonist; and a third that America ought not to be a battle-ground of Irish contentions.  It was upon the last that he dwelt most tenaciously; nor did he give way until he had satisfied himself, after consulting with the highest authorities of his Church, and with two or three of the coolest and most judicious Irish citizens of New York, that I was right in believing that his appearance in the arena as the champion of Ireland, would lift an inevitable controversy high above the atmosphere of unworthy passion, and put it beyond the reach of political mischief-makers.

How nobly he did his work when he had become convinced that he ought to do it, is now matter of history.  But it is a hundredfold more needful now than it was in 1871 and 1872, that the spirit in which he did it should be known and published abroad.  In the interval between the delivery of two of his replies to Mr. Froude, Mr. Froude went to Boston.  A letter from Boston informed me that upon Mr. Froude’s arrival there, all the Irish servants of the friend with whom he was to stay had suddenly left the house, refusing to their employer the right to invite under his roof a guest not agreeable to them.  I handed this letter, without a word, to Father Burke a few hours before he was to speak in the Academy of Music.  He read it with a kind of humorous wrath; and when the evening came, he prefaced his lecture with a few strong and stirring words, in which he castigated with equal sense and severity the misconduct of his country-people, anticipating thus by many a year the spirit in which the supreme authority of his Church has just now dealt with the social plague of “boycotting,” whereof the strike of the servant girls at Boston sixteen years ago was a precursory symptom.