Short of making Carlyle Dictator of the Universe, Froude suggested no alternative to the ballot-box of civilised life.  This last lecture, however, is chiefly remarkable for the rare tribute which it pays to the services of the Catholic priesthood.  Father Burke himself must have been melted when he read, “Ireland is one of the poorest countries in Europe.  There is less theft, less cheating, less house-breaking, less robbery of all sorts, than in any country of the same size in the world.  In the wild district where I lived we slept with unlocked door and open windows, with as much security as if we had been—­I will not say in London or New York, I should be sorry to try the experiment in either place:  I will say as if we had been among the saints in Paradise.  In the sixteenth century the Irish were notoriously regardless of what is technically morality.  For the last hundred years at least impurity has been almost unknown in Ireland.  And this absence of vulgar crime, and this exceptional delicacy and modesty of character, are due alike, to their ever-lasting honour, to the influence of the Catholic clergy.”  That is the testimony of an opponent, and it is emphatic testimony indeed.  To O’Connell Froude is again conspicuously unjust, and his remark that “a few attacks on handfuls of the police, or the blowing in of the walls of an English prison . . . will not overturn an Empire” is open to the observation that they disestablished a Church.  When Froude came to practical politics, he always seemed to be “moving about in worlds not realised.”  His statement that national education in Ireland was the best that existed in any part of the Empire almost takes one’s breath away, and the idea that no Irish legislature would have passed the Land Act is a strange fantasy indeed.  Whether an Irish Parliament could be trusted to deal fairly by the landlords is an open question.  That it would fail to consider the interests of the tenants is unthinkable.  Froude was on much firmer ground when he employed the case of Protestant Ulster, the Ulster of the Plantation, as an argument against Home Rule.  Those Protestants would, he said, fight rather than submit to a Catholic majority, and England could not assent to shooting them down.  There is only one real answer to this objection, and that is that Protestant Ulster would do nothing of the kind.  A logical method of reconciling contradictory prophecies has never been found.  In 1872 Home Rule had no support in England, and even in Ireland the electors were pretty equally divided.  Froude did not lay hold of the American mind, as he might have done, by showing the inapplicability of the Federal System which suits the United States to the circumstances of the United Kingdom.

The impression made by Froude upon his audiences in New York is graphically described by an American reporter.