but of robbery. In so far as smuggling, pure and simple, is concerned, we would not much care if Mr. Froude had shown that the Papist Celts to a man engaged in contraband traffic. When one considers how their honest trade was barred by the English, one is not likely to blame them very severely for an endeavour to strike a balance by trade that the laws disallowed. In page 448 Mr. Froude himself tells us that "the restrictions on trade and commerce were so preposterous that ingenuity could not have invented a policy less beneficial to the country (England) in whose interests it was adopted, or better contrived to demoralize the people (the Irish) at whose expense it was pursued." The Irish wool trade was abolished. Irish cattle were not allowed to be imported into England. Every Irish manufacture except that of linen was destroyed, and the manufacture of linen was permitted simply because in that article, England having none of it, there could be no national rivalry. When it is that the laws of a land become so ridiculously unjust that a subject of the land may decline to observe them is never a very easy matter to settle; but it is never a very difficult thing to settle, when for breaking a law a man has a very plausible excuse; and if ever a people had a plausible excuse for defrauding the revenue, it was the Papist Irish in the days of the penal laws. Moreover, as we have said, the example was set them by the colonists themselves.

Furthermore, it is as plain a fact as any in Irish history that the English systematically attempted not only to extirpate as many of the Irish as possible, but to demoralize all that remained. For the great bulk, therefore, of Irish crime the English are responsible. They systematically made crime by the Irish almost a moral necessity. From the old statutes of Kilkenny, when they refused either to introduce English law beyond the Pale, or to recognize the Brehon as a valid code, but insisted, as far as they could, on condemning the natives to utter lawlessness, on to the times when they disallowed the least efforts at education, religious or secular, "because the people were easier to keep down when they were ignorant Papists," their plan of action was still the same. Whom they could not kill in body they resolved to kill in mind. They, of course, made occasional mistakes, blessing sometimes where they meant to curse; but their animus, fixed and resolute, is unmistakable. How was it, for instance, that the penal laws were often allowed to be a dead letter in all their enactments against the priesthood? The same men who

incited younger sons to conform by the bribe of their fathers' property, and who enforced continually the miserable statute that no Papist should have a horse worth more than £5, shut VOL. XX.-NO. XL. [New Series.]

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their eyes very often to the presence in the land of 3,000 unregistered priests, acting, according to the law, at the peril of their lives. And why? Because the colonists preferred their serfs to remain Papists and Irishmen, knowing that if they became Britons and Protestants their serfdom would end. "Treat a wolf like a dog," says Mr. Froude, "and he will be a wolf still." We cannot enter sufficiently into canine or lupine nature to say; but we know that if a man is systematically treated as an inferior, there is a great chance that eventually he will come to believe in his inferiority. The English knew the principle, and acted upon it. Their object was to get the Irish people to believe themselves slaves.

But the Irish could never be got to believe it. Happy, contented Sambo and they belong to different tribes. Neither would they melt away like the Tasmanians and Red Men. They did not belong to the "rotting races"; and because they would neither cheerfully submit nor quietly die out, they come in for the contempt of Mr. Froude. Had they imitated the Scotch and accepted the situation, Mr. Froude would sing their praises; had they disappeared in a gentle romantic decline, some English Fenimore Cooper-Mr. Froude himself, perhaps would have given them the immortality of a threevolumed novel; but they persisted in living, they persisted in resisting; they are full of life and resistance even now, and Mr. Froude has nothing for them but-500 pieces of cannon!

In whatever remarks we have been making upon the book of Mr. Froude we have been especially anxious to keep before our own mind and the minds of our readers the book's real character. It is not an historical work, and to treat it as an historical work would be folly. It is simply a very voluminous party pamphlet, which for purposes not well concealed adopts a thin historical disguise. Mr. Froude has not so much his story to tell as his thesis to prove, and he works up his proof with all the arts which a highly cultivated and not highly conscientious rhetoric offers. Facts and dates and interesting stories he gives in abundance; but one can see with half an eye that these are but the quasi-historic myrtles with which he wreathes his glaive. His one enduring aim-and of it he never loses sight for a moment-is to get it believed that the only policy for Ireland which was or is or will be effective is the policy of resolute relentless repression. And the correctness of that view he endeavours, as we said, to establish by exhibiting the Irish character as for evermore unmanageable in any other way. The plan of Mr. Froude's book has determined the plan of the present article. We could not regard "The English in Ireland" as a serious

subject for historical criticism. It is simply a polemical production, without the directness of argument and candour of statement and completeness of method which such productions require. And viewing it as a polemical production, we have simply referred to so much of it as appeared best to enforce the thesis of its author. Mr. Froude's thesis is that a Cromwellian policy for Ireland is both necessary and practicable. We now reply that the necessity of such a policy has not been proved by Mr. Froude's book; and that the impracticability of such a policy has been suggested by the issue of Mr. Froude's American lectures. With a few words on these two heads we shall bring this paper to a close.

In the first place then, with regard to the necessity of such a policy. What is and has been the general bearing of Ireland towards England during the last seven hundred years ? Mr. Froude answers one of "inappeasable discontent." With a protest against the word inappeasable we admit the reply. But we ask further, what caused the discontent? Mr. Froude answers the currish character of the Irish Papists. That, we say, is a new reading of history. We think it requires small research to show that it is not a true one. When the Normans first seized Ireland, it was natural enough for the Irish, without their being curs, to exhibit some serious displeasure. No man is quite content to be turned out of his home, even though the intruder be a grand person who rides a war-horse and shines in mail. We may moreover admit that native displeasure with the foreigners continued for a considerable time, the time being all the longer because the Irish, as the Brehon Code testifies, had a very keen sense of the difference between meum and tuum. But what in the circumstances ought the conduct of the Normans to be? At the very least they should abstain from insulting and assailing the men whom they plundered. And we should be justified in expecting from them much more than such abstinence. They ought to have treated the natives kindly; to have won them round by generosity to accept the situation; to have shown them that, though they were dispossessed of their inheritance, they might yet manage to live in a comfortable though inferior position. All this would be much more the duty of the invaders, if they, as Mr. Froude assures us is true, had attained to a comparatively lofty civilization, and if the natives, for which also we have the word of Mr. Froude, were wild houseless barbarians, with only the faintest notions of order and law. But we have already seen that none of these things were done by the Normans. They robbed and murdered the people without any limit save

their own satiety or the people's disappearance. In course of time indeed they came, in the districts which they inhabited, to mix with the people, to understand them, and to treat them with kindness; and the consequence followed which has ever in like circumstances followed in Ireland, the people loved them and served them with a loyalty of which the countrymen of Gurth were simply incapable. But in the outlying districts, whitherward the mass of the inhabitants had fled, the Normans sowed the seeds of a strong though not an undying hate. These things do not look as if they proved for Mr. Froude. When the strangers, used them with anything like fairness the Irish were loyal to the strangers. When the Irish hated the strangers, it was only because robbery and murder, legalized by such satutes as those of John and Edward IV., made anything but hatred impossible. These two facts appear to us to convey a lesson very suitable for Mr. Froude.

But not in Norman times did England and Ireland come into formal connection. The portion of Ireland that had been subdued, even down to as far as the days of Elizabeth, was comparatively small. But in her Majesty's time the whole island was doomed to subjugation, and was actually subdued. We pass over the history of the complete conquest and of the means by which it was accomplished, and we go on to ask, in the reign of Elizabeth, or the reign of James I. or the reign of Charles I., what inducements were held out to make the people contented and loyal? The answer is not much of a mystery. It is recorded in bloody rubrics over all histories, both of England and Ireland, that if the governments of these times did not deliberately mean to drive the Irish people to desperation, that thus they might drive them to death, then the conduct of these governments had no meaning whatever. The people were starved, banished, murdered; their lands were seized and given to strangers. To make laws against Catholicity was (and was known to be) the same as to make laws against all the people; and against Catholicity laws of the most sanguinary character were ac

The loyalty of the Irish figures in a remarkable way in the book of Mr. Froude. It is the sole virtue which he admits they possess. We were deeply gratified when we fell upon the admission, for it was by no means pleasant to find the Irish characterized as utterly and irretrievably vicious. And still we are not happy. Mr. Froude cannot acknowledge Irish loyalty without sneering at it as "that virtue of barbarism"; and how he can consider the Irish seriously loyal, and yet say that under their "most fervid language there is always a cool calculation of interest," we are unable to see. But Mr. Froude is an Utilitarian. It is absurd to be loyal, except when loyalty pays.

cordingly made. There were rebellions. But where is the wonder? Even a deer will turn to bay; even a worm will in his death-hour endeavour to sting. If from time to timein 1599 and 1641 for instance-the trampled, starving, dying Irish had not leaped up at the throats of their oppressors, they would be either equal to the angels that some enthusiastic people consider them, or worse than the curs they are made by Mr. Froude. Rebellion is a "foul, dishonouring" thing. But defence of one's life is not necessarily rebellion. There is a point of insult and oppression beyond which neither a man nor a people can permit tyranny to go. And in the life of Ireland that point has been reached pretty often. Mr. Froude wishes it to be reached once more.

But going still on to the next instance of a manifestation of Irish discontent, that, namely, which was signalized at the Boyne and Aughrim and Limerick, who were to blame? We put altogether out of view that the Irish were fighting for the apparently legitimate king, and could not therefore be properly regarded as rebels. We admit freely that in the main it was true of the people, though scarcely true of the leaders, that they were fighting, not so much for the cause of James as for the cause of Ireland. But, once more, where is the wonder? Here, as before, it is not any constitutional discontent, nor any natural lust to "plunder and kill," but simply the inability to endure torture for ever, and the "inappeasable" instinct of self-preservation that puts the Irish in arms. And it was so throughout all that eighteenth century of which Mr. Froude has written, so, even, of that disastrous rising in Wexford, which brought the century and the independence of Ireland to a close.

And getting into our own century-which is, perhaps, after all, the one of most practical importance in the discussion which Mr. Froude has excited-what evidence is there in the history of the last seventy years that our author's theory of the proper method of governing Ireland is true? Is it supported by the phenomena of "Forty-Eight," or the phenomena of Fenianism? We are not able to think so. Both the Young Ireland party and the party of O'Donovan Rossa have been justified by the two highest, and probably the two best authorities in the land. Mr. Disraeli said, more than twenty years ago, that the state of Ireland was such as in any other landwhat a hint!-would be remedied by revolution. Within the past few years Mr. Gladstone, with that dauntless honesty which is his greatest distinction, declared (1.) that never till our time had justice been offered to Ireland, and (2.) that Fenianism was the phenomenon which compelled himself to