him even in tropical climates.  He cared only too little for Constitutions even when they were his proper business, as they certainly were not in Jamaica.  The object of The English in the West Indies is to make people at home feel an interest in their West Indian fellow-subjects, and that it did by the mere fact of its circulation.  His belief that the West Indies should be governed, like the East Indies, despotically, is a subsidiary matter, and the quaint parody of the Athanasian Creed in which he epitomised what he supposed to be the Radical faith is merely an intellectual amusement.  On the virtues of Rodney, and the future of the Colonies, he is serious, though scarcely practical.

“Imperial Federation,” he wrote in 1887, “is far away, if ever it is to be realised at all.  If it is to come it will come of itself, brought about by circumstances and silent impulses working continuously through many years unseen and unspoken of.  It is conceivable that Great Britain and her scattered offspring, under the pressure of danger from without, or impelled by some purpose, might agree to place themselves under a single administrative head.  It is conceivable that out of a combination so formed, if it led to a successful immediate result, some union of a closer kind might eventually emerge.  It is not only conceivable, but it is entirely certain, that attempts made when no such occasion has arisen, by politicians ambitious of distinguishing themselves, will fail, and in failing will make the object that is aimed at more confessedly unattainable than it is now."*

—­ * English in the West Indies, p. 168. —­

So far Froude’s predictions have been realised.  When he wrote, the Imperial Federation League had just been formed, and Lord Rosebery was arguing for Irish Home Rule as part of a much wider scheme.  Except Australia, which is homogeneous, like the Dominion of Canada, the British Empire is no nearer Federation, and Ireland is no nearer Home Rule, than they were then.  The depression of the sugar trade in the West Indian Islands has been met by a treaty which raises the price of sugar at home, and makes those Colonies proportionately unpopular with the working classes.  It has since been proposed to carry the principle farther, and tax the British workman for the benefit of Colonial manufacturers.  For these strange results of imperial thinking neither Froude nor any of his contemporaries were prepared.  But they correspond accurately, especially the second of them, with the “attempt made by politicians ambitious of distinguishing themselves,” against which Froude warned his countrymen.  Froude was no scientific economist.  He believed in “free trade within the Empire,” which is not free trade.  He was for an imperial tariff, a thing made in Germany, and called a Zollverein.  But his practical experience and personal observation taught him that proposals for closer union with the Colonies must come from the Colonies themselves.  The negroes were a difficulty.