Froude went to the United States with no very exalted opinion of the Irish; he returned with the lowest possible.  “Like all Irish patriots,” including Grattan, Wolfe Tone “would have accepted greedily any tolerable appointment from the Government which he had been execrating.”  The subsequent history of Ireland has scarcely justified this sweeping invective.  “There are persons who believe that if the king had not interfered with Lord Fitzwilliam, the Irish Catholics would have accepted gratefully the religious equality which he was prepared to offer them, and would have remained thenceforward for all time contented citizens of the British Empire.”  So reasonable a theory requires more convincing refutation than a simple statement that it is “incredible.”  Incredible, no doubt, if the Catholics of Ireland were wild beasts, cringing under the whip, ferocious when released from restraint.  Very credible indeed if Irish Catholics in 1795 were like other people, asking for justice, and not expecting an impossible ascendency.  Interesting as Froude’s narrative is, it becomes, when read together with Lecky’s, more interesting still.  Though indignant with Froude’s aspersions upon the Irish race, Lecky did not allow himself to be hurried.  He was writing a history of England as well as of Ireland, and the Irish chapters had to wait their turn.  In Froude’s book there are signs of haste; in Lecky’s there are none.  Without the brilliancy and the eloquence which distinguished Froude, Lecky had a power of marshalling facts that gave to each of them its proper value.  No human being is without prejudice.  But Lecky was curiously unlike the typical Irishman of Froude’s imagination.  He has written what is by general acknowledgment the fairest account of the Irish rebellion, and of the Union to which it led.  Of the eight volumes which compose his History of England in the Eighteenth Century, two, the seventh and eighth, are devoted exclusively to Ireland.

After the publication of his first two volumes he made no direct reference to Froude, and contented himself with his own independent narrative.  He vindicated the conduct of Lord Fitzwilliam, and traced to his recall in 1795 the desperate courses adopted by Irish Catholics.  He showed that Froude had been unjust to the Whigs who gave evidence for Arthur O’Connor at Maidstone in 1798, and especially to Grattan.  That O’Connor was engaged in treasonable correspondence with France there can be no doubt now.  But he did not tell his secrets to his Whig friends, and what Grattan said of his never having heard O’Connor talk about a French invasion was undoubtedly true.* Froude’s hatred of the English Whigs almost equalled his contempt for the Irish Catholics, and the two feelings prevented him from writing anything like an narrative either of the rebellion or of the Union.  No other book of his shows such evident traces of having been written under the influence of Carlyle.  Carlyle’s horror of democracy, worship of force, his belief that