been many less orthodox Fellows than he.  It was more than twenty years before he could lay aside the orders which in a rash moment under an evil system he had assumed.  But he was a preacher, though a lay one, and his life was a struggle for the causes in which he believed.  Ecclesiastical controversies never really interested him, except so far as they touched upon national life and character.  He wished to see the work, of the sixteenth century continued in the nineteenth by the naval power and the Colonial possessions of England.  “England” with him meant not merely that part of Great Britain which lies south of the Tweed, but all the dominions of the Sovereign, the British Empire as a whole.  What Seeley called the expansion of England was to him the chief fact of the present, and the chief problem of the future.  Events since his death have vindicated his foresight.  He urged and predicted the Australian Federation, which he did not live to see.  To the policy which impeded the Federation of South Africa he was steadily opposed.  The moral which he drew from his travels in Australasia, and in the West Indies, was the need for strengthening imperial ties.  Lord Beaconsfield’s Imperialism was not to his taste, and he disliked every form of aggression or pretence.  While he dreaded the intervention of party leaders, and desired the Colonies to take the initiative themselves, he thought that a common tariff was the direction in which true Imperialism should move.  Whether he was right or wrong is too large a question to be discussed here.  That matter must make its own proof.  But in raising it Froude was a pioneer, and, though a man of letters, saw more plainly than practical politicians what were the questions they would have to solve.  He despised local jealousies, and took large views.  Many men, perhaps most men, contract their horizon with advancing years.

Froude’s vision seemed to widen.  Through the storms and mists of passion and prejudice which blinded the eyes of Liberals and Conservatives fighting each other at Westminster, he looked to the ultimate union of all British subjects in an England conterminous with the sovereignty of the Crown.  It was that England of which he wrote the history.  It was knowledge of her past, and belief in her future, that inspired the work of his life.

THE END