massacres of Such 1649.  Such topics cannot be exhaustively treated in part of a single lecture, and Burke could not be expected to put the slaughter of true believers on a level with irregular justice roughly wreaked upon heretics.  The combat was not so much unequal as impossible.  There was no common groud.  Froude could be fair to an eminent especially if he were a Protestant.  His panegyric on Grattan deserves to be quoted alike for its eloquence and its justice.  “In those singular labyrinths of intrigue and treachery,” meaning the secret correspondence at the Castle, “I have found Irishmen whose names stand fair enough in patriotic history concerned in transactions that show them knaves and scoundrels; but I never found stain nor shadow of stain on the reputation of Henry Grattan.  I say nothing of the temptations to which he was exposed.  There were no honours with which England would not have decorated him; there was no price so high that England would not have paid to have silenced or subsidised him.  He was one of those perfectly disinterested men who do not feel temptations of this kind.  They passed by him and over him without giving him even the pains to turn his back on them.  In every step of his life he was governed simply and fairly by what he conceived to be the interest of his country.”  Grattan’s Parliament, as we all know, nearly perished in a dispute about the Regency, and finally disappeared after the rebellion of 1798.  It gave the Catholics votes in 1793, though no Catholic ever sat within its walls.  Grattan, according to Froude, was led astray by the “delirium of nationality,” and the true Irish statesman of his time was Chancellor Fitzgibbon, Lord Clare, whose name is only less abhorred by Irish Nationalists than Cromwell’s own.  Americans did not think nationality a delirium, and their ideal of statesmanship was not represented by Lord Clare.

The fifth and last of Froude’s American lectures was reprinted in Short Studies with the title of “Ireland since the Union."* It has a closer bearing upon current politics than the others, and it runs counter to American as well as to Irish sentiment.  “Suppose in any community two-thirds who are cowards vote one way, and the remaining third will not only vote, but fight the other way.”  The argument has often been used against woman’s suffrage.  One obvious answer is that women, like men, would vote on different sides.  In a community where two-thirds of the adult male population were cowards problems of government would doubtless assume a secondary importance, and that there are limits to the power of majorities no sane Constitutionalist denies.

—­ * Vol. ii. pp, 515-598. —­