Paine.  Yet Froude says that when Burke “took up the Irish cause at last in earnest, it was with a brain which the French Revolution had deranged, and his interference became infinitely mischievous."* As a matter of fact, his interference after 1789 had no result at all.  So far as the French Revolution modified his ideas, it made them more Conservative than ever, and his object in preaching the conciliation of Catholics was to deter them from Revolutionary methods.

—­ * English in Ireland, ii. 214, 215. —­

But Burke, like Grattan, was an Irishman, and therefore not to be trusted.  If he had been an Englishman, or if he had gloried in the name of Protestant, Froude’s eyes would have been opened, and he would have seen Burke’s incomparable superiority to Lord Clare as a just interpreter of events.  Froude looked at the rebellion and the Union from an Orange Lodge, and his book is really an Orange manifesto.  Such works have their purpose, and Froude’s is an unusually eloquent specimen of its class; but they are not history, any more than the speech of Lord Clare on the Union, or the Diary of Wolfe Tone.  Froude does not explain, nor seem to understand, what the supporters of the Irish Legislature meant.  Speaker Foster said that the whole unbribed intellect of Ireland was against the Union.  Foster was the last Speaker in the Irish House of Commons.  He had been elected in 1790 against the “patriot” Ponsonby, and was opposed to the Catholic franchise in 1793.  He was a man of unblemished character, and in a position where he could not afford to talk nonsense.  Yet, if Froude were right, nonsense he must have talked.  Cornwallis, an Englishman, corroborates Foster; Cornwallis is disregarded.  “All that was best and noblest in Ireland” was gathered into the Orange Association, which has been the plague of every Irish Government since the Union.  Froude’s model sovereign of Ireland, as of England, was George iii., who ordered that in a Catholic country “a sharp eye should be kept on Papists,” and would doubtless have joined an Orange Lodge himself if he had been an Irishman and a subject.  The English in Ireland is reported to have been Parnell’s favourite book.  It made him, he said, a Home Ruler because it exposed the iniquities of the English Government.  This was not Froude’s principal object, but the testimony to his truthfulness is all the more striking on that account.  Gladstone, who quoted from the English in Ireland when he introduced his Land Purchase Bill in 1886, paid a just tribute to the “truth and honour” of the writer.

If it be once granted that the Irish are a subject race, that the Catholic faith is a degrading superstition, and that Ireland is only saved from ruin by her English or Scottish settlers, Froude’s book deserves little but praise.  Although he did not study for it as he studied for his History of England he read and copied a large number of State Papers, with a great mass of official correspondence.  Freeman