After a summer cruise in a big schooner with his friend Lord Ducie, whose hospitality at sea he often in coming years enjoyed, Froude sailed from Liverpool in the Russia at the end of September, 1872, with the distinguished physicist John Tyndall.  He was a good sailor, and loved a voyage.  In his first letter to his wife from American soil he describes a storm with the delight of a schoolboy.  “On Saturday morning it blew so hard that it was scarcely possible to stand on deck.  The wind and waves dead ahead, and the whole power of the engines only just able to move the ship against it.  It was the grandest sight I ever witnessed—­the splendid Russia, steady as if she were on a railway, holding her straight course without yielding one point to the sea—­up the long hill-sides of the waves and down into the troughs—­the crests of the sea all round as far as the eye could reach in one wild whirl of foam and spray.  It was worth coming into the Atlantic to see—­with the sense all the time of perfect security.”

Froude’s visit was in one respect well timed.  President Grant had just been assured of his second term, and even politicians had leisure to think of their famous guest.  He was at once invited to a great banquet in New York, and found himself lodged with sumptuous hospitality in a luxurious hotel at the expense of the Bureau which had organised the lectures.  One newspaper quaintly described him as “looking like a Scotch farmer, with an open frank face and calm mild eyes.”  His History was well known, for the Scribners had sold a hundred and fifty thousand copies.  His opinions were of course freely invited, and he did not hesitate to give them.  “I talk much Toryism to them all, and ridicule the idea of England’s decay, or of our being in any danger of revolution; and with Colonies and India and Commerce, etc., I insist that we are just as big as they are, and have just as large a future before us.”  Both Froude and his hosts might have remembered with advantage Disraeli’s fine saying that great nations are those which produce great men.  But the sensual idolatry of mere size is almost equally common on both sides of the Atlantic.

The banquet was given by Froude’s American publishers, the Scribners, and his old acquaintance Emerson was one of the company.  Another was a popular clergyman, Henry Ward Beecher, and a third was the present Ambassador of the United States in London, Mr. Whitelaw Reid.  In his speech Froude referred to the object of his visit.  He had heard at home that “one of the most prominent Fenian leaders,” O’Donovan Rossa, “was making a tour in the United States, dilating upon English tyranny and the wrongs of Ireland.”  That Froude should cross the seas to confute O’Donovan Rossa must have struck the audience as scarcely credible, until he explained his mission, for as such he regarded it, by asserting that “the judgment of America has more weight in Ireland than twenty batteries of English cannon.”  When the Irish had the management of their own affairs, he continued, the result was universal misery.  They could not govern themselves in the sixteenth century; therefore they could not govern themselves in the nineteenth.  If American opinion would only tell the Irish that they had no longer any grievances which legislation could redress, the Irish would believe it, and all would be well.