Though courteously treated as a representative Englishman, Froude had of course no official position, and he hoped that as a private individual his voice might be heard.  But, while there were thousands of native Americans who had no love for their Irish fellow-citizens, there were very few indeed who cared to take up England’s case against Ireland.  The Democratic party were inclined to sympathise with Home Rule as being a mild form of Secession, and the Republican party did not see why Ireland should be refused the qualified independence enjoyed by every State of the Union.  In these unfavourable circumstances Froude delivered his first lecture.  He made a good point when he described the Irish peasant in Munster or Connaught looking to America as his natural protector.  “There is not a lad,” he exclaimed, “in an Irish national school who does not pore over the maps of the States which hang on the walls, gaze on them with admiration and hope, and count the years till he too shall set his foot in those famous cities which float before his imagination like the gardens of Aladdin.”  Nevertheless he asked his hearers and readers to take it from him that Ireland had no longer any good ground of complaint against the Parliament of the United Kingdom.  Independence she could not have, and that not because the interests of Great Britain forbade it, which would have been an intelligible argument, but because she was unfit for it herself.

“If I were to sum up in one sentence the secret of Ireland’s misfortunes, I should say it lay in this:  that while from the first she has resisted England, complained of England, appealed to heaven and earth against the wrongs which England has inflicted on her, she has ever invited others to help her, and has never herself made an effective fight for her own rights ....  A majority of hustings votes might be found for a separation.  The majority would be less considerable if instead of a voting-paper they were called to handle a rifle.”

To tell Irishmen that they could obtain liberty by fighting for it, and would never get it in any other way, was not likely to conciliate them, or to promote the cause of peace.  Froude’s appeal to American opinion, however, was more practical.

“The Irishman requires to be ruled, but ruled as all men ought to be, by the laws of right and wrong, laws which shall defend the weak from the strong and the poor from the rich.  When the poor peasant is secured the reward of his own labour, and is no longer driven to the blunderbuss to save himself and his family from legalised robbery, if he prove incorrigible then, I will give him up.  But the experiment remains to be made.”