They were not really fit for self-government, as the statesmen of the American Union had found.  Personal freedom, the inalienable right of all men and all women, is a very different thing from the possession of a vote.  As for India, the idea of Home Rule there had receded a long way into the distance since the sanguine predictions of Macaulay.  Perhaps Froude never quite worked out his conceptions of the federal system which he would have liked to see.  In Australia it would have been plain sailing.  In Canada it was already established.  In South Africa it would have embodied the union of British with Dutch, and prevented the disasters which have since occurred.  In the West Indies it would have raised problems of race and colour which are more prudently agitated at a greater distance from the Black.  Republic of Hayti.  Imperial Federalists not yet explained what they would do with India.

Froude neither was nor aimed at being practical politican.  His object, in which he succeeded, was to kindle in the public mind at home that imaginative enthusiasm for the Colonial idea of which his own heart was full.  Although the measure of Colonial loyalty was given afterwards in the South African War, the despatch of troops from Sydney to the Soudan in 1885 showed that ties of sentiment are the strongest of all.  It was those ties, rather than any political or commercial bond, which Froude desired to strengthen.  No one would have liked less to live in a Colony.  Colonial society did not suit him.  Colonial manners were not to his mind.  But to meet governing men, like Sir Henry Norman, a “warm Gladstonian,” by the way, was always a pleasure to him, and as a symbol of England’s greatness he loved her territory beyond the seas.

The Two Chiefs of Dunboy, published in 1889, was Froude’s one mature and serious attempt at a novel.  For distinction of style and beauty of thought it may be compared with the greatest of historical romances.  If it was the least successful of his books, the failure can be assigned to the absence of women, or at least of love, which ever since Dr. Johnson’s definition, if not before, has been expected in a novel.  The scene is laid in the neighbourhood of his favourite Derreen, and the period is the middle of the eighteenth century.  The real hero is an English Protestant, Colonel Goring.  Goring “belonged to an order of men who, if they had been allowed fair play, would have made the sorrows of Ireland the memory of an evil dream; but he had come too late, the spirit of the Cromwellians had died out of the land, and was not to be revived by a single enthusiast.”  He was murdered, and Froude could point his favourite moral that the woes of the sister country would be healed by the appearance of another Cromwell, which he had to admit was improbable.  The Irish hero, Morty Sullivan, has been in France, and is ready to fight for the Pretender.  He did no good.  Few Irishmen, in Froude’s opinion, ever did any good.  But in The Two Chiefs of Dunboy, if