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from the new colony; and, because in pure self-preservation the Irish people elected to dwell in the remote and less accessible parts of the island, they are called by Mr. Froude "wild and wayward vagabonds." A little earlier* he informs us that "there was not originally any one advantage which England possessed which she was not willing and eager to share with Ireland," a statement which is simply astounding. About the same place we are assured that the Normans introduced, where no such thing existed before, some kind of order and law, a statement which is still more remarkable. As a matter of fact, no matter what disorders reigned in Ireland before the invasion, that event only introduced others still greater. There were not only the attacks of the newcomers on the natives, but there were the perpetual squabbles among the new comers themselves. From Strongbow to Henry VIII. the Normans in Ireland were playing that French game which the great English feudal lords were never strong enough to engage in, except once in Stephen's time, and once again during the wars of the Roses. From day to day it was Butler against Fitzgerald, De Burgh against De Lacy, without any central power to control them, nay, with England, when she found the families growing dangerously powerful, secretly setting them on to intestine strife. Of course we do not wish to forget that in course of time some of the foreign families became attached to the Irish race, adopted some of their customs, and ruled their Irish retainers with a chivalrous generosity. But in so far as they did all this they ceased to be Normans. Civilization came not from them to the Irish, but from the Irish to them.

The next band of regenerators of any importance arrived in Tudor times. We may call them by the general name of Undertakers. In speaking of these we find our author become more than ordinarily paradoxical. For instance, he tells us in page 49 that Elizabeth and her Undertakers were very anxious to protect the Irish owners in the possession of their lands; that England had a scrupulous anxiety to secure their estates to the Irish owners. Mr. Froude thinks that any such respect for Irish property was foolish; and it is his opinion that Elizabeth should have planted Munster with Protestants "resolutely and thoroughly." After so much it is curious to hear him speak of the causes of the Desmond Rebellion. He tells us that disgust with Irish anarchy had led to the discussion of schemes for resettling the South by the English; that volunteers came forward from England

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offering, in exchange for the lands, to bear the cost of military occupation; that Cecil hinted that first the Irish should forfeit their lands by some act of rebellion; that the volunteers took the hint; that the country was mapped out, and that claims began to be made on the Irish estates through the medium of defunct Norman charters; that the Irish saw what was coming; that their susceptibilities were excited, and that they rebelled. Wholesale confiscation was the consequence. How this manoeuvring of Cecil and of the Undertakers shows an English anxiety to protect Irish landowners it is not very easy to perceive.

Between the Tudor times and those of which Mr. Froude's book purports specially to treat, namely the hundred years subsequent to the Williamite wars, the only other apostles of Irish civilization whom we think it worth while to notice are the Cromwellians. And of them we need only say that their scheme of regeneration is abundantly well known. They would regenerate by exterminating. Their sole baptism for Ireland was the baptism of blood. The slaughter at Drogheda, of which Mr. Froude speaks so carelessly, was perhaps exceptional; but the spirit that dictated it was dominant in all the years of Oliver's Irish rule. The country was reduced to a state even more horrible than its condition after Kinsale. The printed declarations of the Council, 1653, speak of numbers starving on the highways, and of children left to be devoured alive by beasts and birds of prey. Women, like famished wolves, were known to rush upon a horseman, tear him from his saddle and devour his beast ere it had time to completely die; and there are even accounts given us of children killed by their parents and devoured. We have even a story that in its surroundings looks more horrible still. A Colonel Richard Lawrence, being out one night with his troop, came upon a large fire, around which he found "a miserable company of old women and children, and betwixt them and the fire a dead corpse lay broiling, which, as the fire wasted, they cut off collops and ate." It is for no sensation purpose we mention these horrors. They are known to all readers of Irish history. We mention them for the sole motive of drawing the reader to observe how they were caused. Sir Charles Coote had laid down as a principle that in order to settle the Irish difficulty, not only the Irish foxes, but the Irish cubs must die; and he had put the principle to practical account in Wicklow, where he ordered that no Irish person should be spared, save and except these not very usual entities, "infants of a span long." The Cromwellians followed the plan of Sir Charles in some places; in others they adopted

one quite as effective, and not quite as provocative of the revenge of despair. They starved, or tried to starve, the nation to death. Scythes were imported from England to cut down the corn which the Irish would have to live upon in the winter time.

When Mr. Froude has sketched the history of Ireland for the previous seven centuries he has the reader ready to enter with him upon his main business, the history of the eighteenth. And we are anxious that the reader should remember here what we deliberately declare to be the purpose of all portions, of the book before us. Its obvious, though not its avowed purpose, is by ruining the Irish character to ruin the Irish cause. A secondary, but we think only a secondary purpose with Mr. Froude, was to insinuate a defence for the English method of governing Ireland. With that method of course Mr. Froude finds fault. But he finds fault with it for a reason precisely the opposite to that which makes it be generally blamed. It is generally blamed for its cruel severity; Mr. Froude blames it because it was not severe enough. Three or four attempts-we may specify Cromwell's-were, he thinks, made to rule Ireland wisely; but from weakness and want of persistence in the rulers these attempts fell through. For it is clearly and almost avowedly Mr. Froude's sentiment, that the only policy fitted for Ireland is the policy of extermination. "True freedom," he says, "the inhabitants of the sister isle never sought or cared for; all they wanted was to be left free to plunder and kill." And when in his American tour he states his reason for that extraordinary undertaking to be because American opinion is worth to the Irish 500 pieces of cannon, he hints pretty clearly what must in the end be, according to him, the mode of solving the Irish question. The British empire is to be saved as the German empire was made, by blood and iron. And such being the view of Mr. Froude, we see a plain reason for his plain purpose in his latest performances. Let all the world know, he says, that we must rule Ireland with an iron rod. But let all the world know, he adds, that Ireland is unworthy of being ruled in any other way. And therefore does he set himself definitely and persistently to blacken the Irish. And it is only by keeping that thought in mind that one sees sustained connection in the book of Mr. Froude. Without that gleam of darkness visible it is a chaos.

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Now what are these charges which Mr. Froude makes against the Irish character? It is not easy to collect and methodize them, for they are scattered through a vast variety of pages, and are very often so finely pointed as to be barely

perceptible; but they may, we think, be reduced to two classes-charges against the general Irish character, and charges against special Irish acts. When we have put a few specimens of both these classes before our readers, we shall be able to determine not only whether Mr. Froude's Irish policy is practicable, but also whether it is necessary. Of course, if we are doomed to go again through the old Cromwellian furnace, we must try to take the ordeal as cheerfully as we can. But we would not like to try it; and we therefore hope that we may discover reasons for thinking that Mr. Froude's Irish policy is not a necessity.

The principal crime which Mr. Froude puts to the account of the Irish is the crime of a cringing cowardice. He does not venture so far as in plain direct speech to call them cowards; but all through his book he persistently insinuates that they are; and to prove that they are is essential to his argument even as conceived by himself. If they were a valiant race, bent on death sooner than submission, it would not be possible to defend the useless attempts stretching through centuries to bring them to obedience; and it would be altogether impossible to advocate against them that policy which Mr. Froude recommends for the future; but the Irish, our author says, would neither "submit honourably nor resist courageously": they could do nothing but be inappeasably discontented, and this inappeasable discontent has been attended by a "paralysis of all manliness." Mr. Froude's proofs of the characteristic cowardice of the Irish race are not very numerous. One, to which he refers at some length, is the result of the rising in 1641. The Irish army at that time was, he believes, overwhelmingly stronger than the army which smote it hip and thigh, and scattered it as a single lion would scatter a pack of curs. But on this instance of Irish impotence it is not necessary to speak. Recent writers have so exposed Mr. Froude's facts and figures that we may regard this portion of his book as expunged. But there is another line of argument which Mr. Froude follows with great verve and gusto, and which has at first blush undoubtedly some appearance of cogency. It rests on a contrast between the Irish and the Scotch. The latter made a strong and sturdy and valiant resistance to English encroachment; and even when they were beaten, had won the respect and admiration of their conquerors: but the Irish always made a poor fight. They were quick enough to rebel, quick enough "to plunder and kill," but as for standing up and battling heroically for what they considered their freedom, the people of Ireland never had the courage to do it.

Now it is no part of our present business to exalt Irish bravery by depreciating Scottish; but we think this contrast of Mr. Froude very unhappy. It used to be the boast of the invincible Englishman, and his highest boast too, that he never knew when he was beaten. That is a knowledge which the Irish people, even according to Mr. Froude, never could acquire; but it is a knowledge which the people of Scotland acquired very quickly. If the weaker of two is beaten and submits, his submission may be taken as a proof of discretion; if he be beaten and will not submit, his defiance of his victor is, we think, scarcely a proof that he is wanting in valour. But in truth this contrast of Ireland with Scotland demonstrates nothing so much as Mr. Froude's ignorance of the state of the case. Scotland had never to fight, as Ireland has been always fighting, against enemies stationed in her own household. The country of Mr. Carlyle was at the time of its conquest by England a poor barren country. English adventurers were too cunning and too fond of good things to bother themselves about "the bannocks of barley meal"; and consequently, though for purposes of safety Scotland was sometimes invaded, sometimes occupied, it was never colonized by an English population. With Ireland it was very different. For her every one was ready. The man who looked upon the world as his oyster, "which he with sword would open," and the man

"Whose most ingenious wit With legal maxims did not fit,"

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was only too willing to settle as a sentry and proprietor on Irish soil. The land was excellent, and was believed to be far better than it is in reality. The wool of Irish sheep was famed throughout Europe, and the most rapid and most extensive English fortunes were there made by sheep-farming. And so English adventurers were always prepared to pass over to Ireland, and, give them but their letters of marque, they were never wanting to "stir up a convenient treason,' and to carve out their own slices from the lands of the King's Irish enemies. Ireland, in fact, became both colonized and garrisoned at the same time, and by the same people; and it was the garrison colony which kept her for England down from the days of Cromwell on to the days of William, and even to our own. If such a course had been adopted in Scotland, supposing the country rich enough to make such a course feasible, what kind of fight would the Scotch have made? This is asked on the supposition that the attempts of Scotland to retain her independence are worthy of the praises

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