While Froude was writing his English in Ireland he received an invitation to give a series of lectures in the United States.  “The Yankees,” he says to Skelton,+ “have written to me about going over to lecture to them.  I am strongly tempted; but I could not tell the truth about Ireland without reflecting in a good many ways on my own country.  I don’t fancy doing that, however justly, to amuse Jonathan.”  These words certainly do not show implacable bitterness against Ireland.  Brought face to face with responsibility, Froude always felt the weight of it, and he was never consciously unfair.  He was under a strong sense of obligation, which he felt bound to fulfil.  It is impossible not to admire the chivalrous and intrepid spirit with which he undertook singlehanded to justify the conduct of his countrymen before the American people, and to persuade them that England had provocation for her treatment of Ireland.  Once convinced that his cause was righteous, he never flinched.  He believed that false views of the Irish question prevailed in America, and that he could set them right.  He did not altogether underrate the magnitude of the enterprise.  “I go like an Arab of the desert,” he wrote to Skelton a little later:  “my hand will be against every man, and therefore every man’s hand will be against me."* A belief in Ireland’s wrongs was part of the American creed, like the faithlessness of Charles ii. and the tyranny of George iii.  Irish Americans had enormous influence at elections, in Congress, and in the newspapers.  Released Fenians, O’Donovan Rossa among them, had been spreading what they called the light, and their own countrymen at all events believed what they said.  The American people as a whole were not unfriendly to England.  The Alabama Arbitration and the Geneva Award had destroyed the ill feeling that remained after the fall of Richmond.  But it was not worth the while of any American politician to alienate the Irish vote, and most Americans honestly thought, not without reason, that the policy of England in Ireland had been abominable.  To let sleeping dogs lie might be wise.  Once they were unchained, no American hand would help to chain them up again.  Froude, however, conceived that circumstances were unusually favourable.  The Irish Church had been disestablished, and the Fenian prisoners had been set free.  The Irish Land Act of 1870 had recognised the Irish tenant’s right to a partnership in the soil.  Although Froude had no sympathy, ecclesiastical or political, with Gladstone, he did think that the Land Act was a just and beneficent measure from which good would come.  In the firm belief that he could vindicate the statesmanship of his own country before American audiences without sacrificing the paramount claims of truth and justice, he accepted the invitation.

—­ + Table Talk of Shirley, p. 149. * Table Talk of Shirley, p. 151. —­