Meanwhile Froude continued his History, and by the beginning of the year 1874 had brought it down to the Union, with which it concludes.  No more unsparing indictment of a nation has ever been drawn.  Except Lord Clare, and the Orange Lodges, formed after the Battle of the Diamond, scarcely an Irishman or an Irish institution spared.  Grattan’s Parliament, though it did contain a single Catholic, is condemned because it gave the Catholics votes in 1793.  The recall of Lord Fitzwilliam, an Englishman and a Protestant, in 1795, is justified because he was in favour of emancipation.  Flood and Curran are treated with disdain.  Burke, though he was no more a Catholic than Froude himself, is told that he was not a true Protestant, and did not understand his own countrymen.  Sir Ralph Abercrombie was possessed with an “evil spirit,” because he urged that rebels should not be punished by soldiers without the sanction of the civil magistrate.  His successor, General Lake, who was responsible for pitch-caps, receives a gentle, a very gentle, reprimand.

“The United Irishmen had affected the fashion of short hair.  The loyalists called them Croppies, and if a Croppy prisoner stood silent when it was certain [without a trial] that he could confess with effect, paper or linen caps smeared with pitch were forced upon his head to bring him to his senses.  Such things ought not to have been, and such things would not have been had General Lake been supplied with English troops, but assassins and their accomplices will not always be delicately handled by those whose lives they have threatened occasionally.  Not a few men suffered who were innocent, so far as no definite guilt could be proved against them.  At such times, however, those who are not actively loyal lie in the borderland of just suspicion."* That all Irish Catholics were guilty unless they could prove themselves to be innocent is a proposition which cannot be openly maintained, and vitiates history if it be tacitly assumed.  Froude honestly and sincerely believed that the Irish people were unfit for representative government.  He compares the Irish rebellion of 1798 with the Indian Mutiny of 1857, and suggests that Ireland should have been treated like Oude.  Lord Moira, known afterwards as Lord Hastings, and Governor-General of India, is called a traitor because he sympathised with the aspirations of his countrymen.  Lord Cornwallis is severely censured for endeavouring to infuse a spirit of moderation into the Executive after the rebellion had been put down.  What Cornwallis thought of the means by which the Union was carried is well known.  “I long,” he said in 1799 “to kick those whom my public duty obliges me to court.  My occupation is to negociate and job with the most corrupt people under heaven.  I despise and hate myself every hour for engaging in such dirty work, and am supported only by the reflection that without a Union the British Empire must be dissolved.”  That is the real case for the Union, which could not