"HISTORIAN" FROUDE AGAIN.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XV, Issue 2, 7 May 1886, Page 13

"HISTORIAN" FROUDE AGAIN.

(From the Irish American,') IT is quite in keeping with the natural law^ of cause and effect, that Mr. James Anthony Froude should appear on the surface of events at the present time, when such prominence is given to the " Irish Question," to decide which, in his peculiar fashion, he came across the Atlantic, and to the American people— as to a tribunal having jurisdiction in the case of England versus Ireland— he made his appeal in open court, with the result of eliciting a verdict against himself and his country which is again being emphatically affirmed, on both sides of the ocean, and with heavy costs against the appellant. It is all the more in keeping with the current of affairs that Mr. Froude should, onco more, be inspired to free his soul on the subject of the rebellious perverseness of the people whose national character he sought to blacken in the eyes of the world, that he now sees, in the British House of Commons, a select band (—some twentyfive or so— ) of his beloved Cromwellians, acting together, as that tribe have ever done, as the jackals of the invading lion, on bis mission of plundering and exterminating the Irish race. It is even the influence of this small, but congenial, clique of Orange Tories that has partially drawn the " historian " from his seclusion, and induced him to venture anew upon the experiment of pen, ink and print, with reference to Irish politics. The little coterie led by Saunderson and " Ballykilbeg " ho thoroughly recognised the fact thai; Froude is their true and particular evangelist, tbat they tendered him an invitation to go over and lecture in Belfast on " The Irish Crisis." But the " historian's " soul has been he ivy within him since his encounter, in New Yoik, with Father Burke and Jahn Mitchel ; and, like Achilles sulking in his tent, he declined the invocation to the fray. In his letter he intimates that the time has not yet come for him to enter upon Buch a mission— which might perhaps afford the opportunity to add a chapter on " The English in Ireland in the Nineteenth cen ury" to his former work, only that the requisite materials wilh which the previous hundred years had been so replete are not yet at hand. " Talking." Mr. Froude says, "is of little use ; but the time for action is approaching. England is now asleep, but when the state of anarchy in Ireland shall have become-intolerable, she will awake, and do as she has done before." This is characteristicall/ Froudeish, and in keeping with the ferocious exultation with which the wiiter of it premised his narration of the slaughters of Drcglieda and Wcxford with the curt declaration that " Cromwell did not come to Ireland to make war with rose-water 1" But, with all Mr. Froude's ability as a " historian," his unmitigated and ineradicable English prejudices blind him so thoroughly to everything tbat is not included in bis own self-created world, that he cannot observe even the signs of the times ; so that his affected foresight and prevision of events to come are as valueless as his mendacious wresting of the res gesta of the past has shown hid his "hindsight" to be unreliable. He voices the sentiment of the England of a by-gone age, not the Power of the present. As the great Apostle puts it— in an opposite and better sense — the will to wreak unsparing vengeance on the unyielding victims of their tyranny may be as rank to-day in the hearts of England's rulers as ever it was in the times of the Tudors, or the Stuartq, or Cromwell's canting marauders ; but the ability to put that will into effect is wanting ; — the power to "do as she has done before " has departed from the old pirate of the nations, never again to nerve her bloodstained arms. For which lavs Bio! Let Mr. Froude content himself with the, to him, congenial work of distilling the concetrated venom of Thomas Carlyle, to which he has of late devoted himself ; he will never have the chance to write the concluding chapter to his discredited history of the relations between his country and Ireland, to which his last letter shows that his hopes still turn, and the scope of which be indicated some time ago, when he predicted that England would be forced to " reconquer " the island, in order to put an end to the National movement. Even while he penned his latest missive, a better Englishman and wiser statesman tnan he was telling his countrymen, face to face, that, though they might perpetrate the iniquity which Mr. Froude contemplates with such savage satisfaction, the price they would have !f> pay would be too great ; and he was right. England is under too heavy bonds to the world at large to be any longer in. condition to " do as she has done before," towards Ireland ; and, whether she may exhibit reluctance to do that justice that alone can ensure her peace and safety, or not, most assuredly no government that is ntt bent on her ruin and destruction, as a powir, will now attempt to place her in the role so flippautly laid out fcr her by James Anthony Fioude.