A passage from the diary concerning the appointment of Colonial Governors will be regarded by all official persons as obsolete.

“The English nation, if they wish to keep the Colonies, ought to insist on proper men being chosen as Governors ....  The Colonial Office is not to blame and will only be grateful for an expression of opinion which will enable them to answer pressure upon them with a peremptory ‘Impossible.’  Court influence, party influence, party convenience, all equally injurious.  A noble lord is out at elbows; give him a Governorship of a Colony.  A party politician must be disappointed in arrangements at home; console him with a Colony.  The Colonists feel that no respect is felt for them; anybody will do for a Colony; and whether it is a Crown Colony, or a with responsible government of its own, the effect is equally mischievous.  In fact, while they continue liable, and occasionally subject, to treatment of this kind, the feelings insensibly generate which will lead in the end to separation.”

The immediate consequence of Froude’s West Indian travels was his well-known book The English in the West Indies, to which he gave a second title, one that he himself preferred, The Bow of Ulysses.  It was illustrated from his own sketches, for he had inherited that gift from his father.  Being often controversial in tone, and not always accurate in description, it provoked numerous criticisms, though not of the sort which interfere with success.  In everything Froude wrote, though least of all in his History, allowance has to be made for the personal equation.  He had not Carlyle’s memory, nor his unfailing accuracy of eye.  Where he wrote from mere recollection, deserting the safe ground of his diary, he was liable to error, and few men of letters have been less capable of producing a trustworthy guide book.  The value of Oceana and The Bow of Ulysses is altogether different.  They are the characteristic reflections of an intensely vivid, highly cultivated mind, bringing out of its treasure-house things new and old.  “The King knows your book,” it was said to Montaigne, “and would like to know you.”  “If the King knows my book,” replied the philosopher, “he knows me.”  Froude is in his books, especially in his books of travel, for in them, more than anywhere else, he thinks aloud.  There are strange people in the world.  One of them criticised Froude in an obituary notice because, when he went to Jamaica, he sat in the shade reading Dante while he might have been studying the Jamaican Constitution.  There may be those who would study the Jamaican Constitution, what there is of it, in the sun, while they might, if they could, read Dante in the shade, and the necrologist in question may be one of them.  Froude did not go to study Constitutions, which he could have studied at home.  He went to see for himself what the West Indian Colonies were like, and his incorrigible habit of reading the best literature did not forsake