The Life of Froude Part 6

- Several years afterwards, in 1878, the subject was fully discussed, and Froude's conclusions were shown to be unsound, by another historian, William Edward Hartpole Lecky. Lecky was a much more formidable critic than Freeman. Calm in temperament and moderate in language, he could take part in an historical controversy without getting into a rage. Freeman, after pages of mere abuse, would pounce with triumphant e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns upon a misprint. Lecky did not waste his time either on scolding or on trifles. The faults he found were grave, and his censure was not the less severe for being decorous. An Anglicised Irishman, living in England, though a graduate of Dublin University, Lecky became known when he was a very young man for a brilliant little book on Leaders of Irish Opinion. He had since published mature and valuable histories of rationalism, and of morals. His History of England in the Eighteenth Century is likely to remain a standard book, being written with fairness, lucidity, and candour. It is true that in his Irish chapters, with which alone I am concerned, Lecky, like Froude, wrote with a purpose. He was an Irish patriot, and bent on making out the best possible case for his own country.

At the same time he was, for an Irishman, singularly impartial between Catholic and Protestant, leaning, if at all, to the Protestant side. Yet he repudiated with indignant vehemence Froude's attempt to connect the Catholic Church with these atrocious crimes. I am bound to say that I think he disproves the charge of ecclesiastical complicity. The evidence upon which Froude relied, the only evidence accessible, is the collection of presentments by Grand Juries, with the accompanying depositions, in Dublin Castle. In the first sixty years of the eighteenth century there were twenty-eight cases of abduction thus recorded. In only four of them can it be shown that the perpetrator was a Catholic and the victim a Protestant. In only one, which Froude has described at much length, did the criminal try to make a Protestant girl attend ma.s.s. For one of the cases, which according to Froude went unpunished, two men were hanged. "The truth is," says Lecky, "that the crime was merely the natural product of a state of great lawlessness and barbarism."* These offences have so completely disappeared from Ireland that even the memory of them has perished, and yet Ireland remains as Catholic as ever. Arthur Young, who denounces them as scandalous to a civilised community, does not hint that they had anything to do with religion, nor were they ever cited in defence of the penal code. Froude was led astray by religious prejudice, and forgot for once the historian in the advocate. The penal codes were rather the cause than the effect of crime and outrage in Ireland. By setting authority on one side, and popular religion on the other, they made a breach of the law a pious and meritorious act. The bane of English rule in Ireland at that time was the treatment of Catholics as enemies, and the, Charter Schools which Froude praises were employed for the purpose of alienating children from the faith of their parents. This mean and paltry persecution strengthened instead of weakening the Roman Catholic Church.

- * England in the Eighteenth Century, ii. 365. -

Meanwhile Froude continued his History, and by the beginning of the year 1874 had brought it down to the Union, with which it concludes. No more unsparing indictment of a nation has ever been drawn. Except Lord Clare, and the Orange Lodges, formed after the Battle of the Diamond, scarcely an Irishman or an Irish inst.i.tution spared. Grattan's Parliament, though it did contain a single Catholic, is condemned because it gave the Catholics votes in 1793. The recall of Lord Fitzwilliam, an Englishman and a Protestant, in 1795, is justified because he was in favour of emanc.i.p.ation. Flood and Curran are treated with disdain. Burke, though he was no more a Catholic than Froude himself, is told that he was not a true Protestant, and did not understand his own countrymen. Sir Ralph Abercrombie was possessed with an "evil spirit," because he urged that rebels should not be punished by soldiers without the sanction of the civil magistrate. His successor, General Lake, who was responsible for pitch-caps, receives a gentle, a very gentle, reprimand.

"The United Irishmen had affected the fashion of short hair. The loyalists called them Croppies, and if a Croppy prisoner stood silent when it was certain [without a trial] that he could confess with effect, paper or linen caps smeared with pitch were forced upon his head to bring him to his senses. Such things ought not to have been, and such things would not have been had General Lake been supplied with English troops, but a.s.sa.s.sins and their accomplices will not always be delicately handled by those whose lives they have threatened occasionally. Not a few men suffered who were innocent, so far as no definite guilt could be proved against them. At such times, however, those who are not actively loyal lie in the borderland of just suspicion."* That all Irish Catholics were guilty unless they could prove themselves to be innocent is a proposition which cannot be openly maintained, and vitiates history if it be tacitly a.s.sumed. Froude honestly and sincerely believed that the Irish people were unfit for representative government. He compares the Irish rebellion of 1798 with the Indian Mutiny of 1857, and suggests that Ireland should have been treated like Oude. Lord Moira, known afterwards as Lord Hastings, and Governor-General of India, is called a traitor because he sympathised with the aspirations of his countrymen. Lord Cornwallis is severely censured for endeavouring to infuse a spirit of moderation into the Executive after the rebellion had been put down. What Cornwallis thought of the means by which the Union was carried is well known. "I long," he said in 1799 "to kick those whom my public duty obliges me to court. My occupation is to negociate and job with the most corrupt people under heaven. I despise and hate myself every hour for engaging in such dirty work, and am supported only by the reflection that without a Union the British Empire must be dissolved." That is the real case for the Union, which could not be better stated than Cornwallis has stated it. Carried by corrupt means as it was, it might have met with gradual acquiescence if only it had been accompanied, as Pitt meant to accompany it, by Catholic emanc.i.p.ation. On this point Froude goes all lengths with George III., whose hatred of Catholicism was not greater than his own. In the development of his theory, he was courageous and consistent. He struck at great names, denouncing "the persevering disloyalty of the Liberal party, in both Houses of the English Legislature," including Fox, Sheridan, Tierney, Holland, the Dukes of Bedford and Norfolk, who dared to propose a policy of conciliation with Ireland, as Burke had proposed it with the American colonies. Even Pitt does not come up to Froude's standard, for Pitt removed Lord Camden, and sent out Lord Cornwallis.

- * English in Ireland, iii. 336. -

It is no disqualification for an historian to hold definite views, which, if he holds them, it must surely be his duty to express. The fault of The English in Ireland is to overstate the case, to make it appear that there was no ground for rebellion in 1798, and no objection to union in 1800. The whole book is written on the supposition that the Irish are an inferior race and Catholicism an inferior religion. So far as religion was concerned, Lecky did not disagree with Froude. But either because he was an Irishman, or because he had a judicial mind, he could see the necessity of understanding what Irish Catholics aimed at before pa.s.sing judgment upon them. Froude could never get out of his mind the approval of treason and a.s.sa.s.sination to which in the sixteenth century the Vatican was committed. It may be fascinating polemics to taunt the Church of Rome with being "always the same." But as a matter of fact the Church is not the same. It improves with the general march of the progress that it condemns. Froude fairly and honourably quotes a crucial instance. Pitt "sought the opinion of the Universities of France and Spain on the charge generally alleged against Catholics that their allegiance to their sovereign was subordinate to their allegiance to the Pope; that they held that heretics might lawfully be put to death, and that no faith was to be kept with them. The Universities had unanimously disavowed doctrines which they declared at once inhuman and unchristian, and on the strength of the disavowal the British Parliament repealed the Penal Acts of William for England and Scotland, restored to the Catholics the free use of their chapels, and readmitted them to the magistracy." Toleration was extended to Ireland by giving the franchise to Catholics, and complete emanc.i.p.ation might have followed but for the interference of the king, which involved the recall of Lord Fitzwilliam.

To prevent that calamitous measure no one worked harder than Edmund Burke, whose religion was as rational as his patriotism was sincere. In the last of his published letters, written to Sir Hercules Langrishe, in the year before the rebellion, the year of his own death, he said that "Ireland, locally, civilly, and commercially independent, ought politically to look up to Great Britain in all matters of peace or war; in all those points to be guided by her: and in a word, with her to live and to die." "At bottom," he added, "Ireland has no other choice; I mean no other rational choice." To a Parliamentary Union accompanied by emanc.i.p.ation Burke might have been brought by the rebellion. Protestant ascendency as understood in his time he would always have repudiated, if only because it furnished recruits to the Jacobinism which he loathed more than anything else in the world. He even denied that there was such a thing as the Protestant religion. The difference between Protestantism and Catholicism was, he said, a negative, and out of a negative no religion could be made. To persecute people for believing too much was even more preposterous than to persecute them for believing too little. Protestant ascendency was social ascendency, and had no motive so respectable as bigotry behind it. Burke never conceived the possibility of disestablishing the Irish Church, or even of curtailing its emoluments. He would have been satisfied with a Parliament from which Catholics were not excluded. Froude brushed almost contemptuously aside the theories of an ill.u.s.trious Irishman, the first political writer of his age, and an almost fanatical enemy of revolution.

Genius apart, Burke was peculiarly well qualified to form an opinion. He knew England as well as Ireland; and imperial as his conceptions were, they never extinguished his love for the land of his birth. He was himself a member of the Established Church, and a firm supporter of her connection with the State. But his wife was a Roman Catholic, and for the old faith he had a sympathetic respect. For the French Directory, with which Wolfe Tone was a.s.sociated, he felt a pa.s.sionate hatred of which he has left a monument more durable than bra.s.s in the Reflections on the French Revolution, and the Letters on a Regicide Peace. He worshipped the British Const.i.tution with the unquestioning fervour of a devotee, and he had been attacked by the new Whigs in Parliament as the recipient of a pension from the king. The old Whigs, his Whigs, had coalesced with Pitt, and the chief fault he found with the Government was that it did not carry on the French war with sufficient vigour. That Burke should have retained his calmness of mind in writing of Ireland when he lost it in writing of all other subjects is a curious circ.u.mstance, But it is a circ.u.mstance which ent.i.tles him to peculiar attention from the Irish historian. Burke was no oracle of Irish revolutionists. Their hero was his critic, Tom Paine. Yet Froude says that when Burke "took up the Irish cause at last in earnest, it was with a brain which the French Revolution had deranged, and his interference became infinitely mischievous."* As a matter of fact, his interference after 1789 had no result at all. So far as the French Revolution modified his ideas, it made them more Conservative than ever, and his object in preaching the conciliation of Catholics was to deter them from Revolutionary methods.

- * English in Ireland, ii. 214, 215. -

But Burke, like Grattan, was an Irishman, and therefore not to be trusted. If he had been an Englishman, or if he had gloried in the name of Protestant, Froude's eyes would have been opened, and he would have seen Burke's incomparable superiority to Lord Clare as a just interpreter of events. Froude looked at the rebellion and the Union from an Orange Lodge, and his book is really an Orange manifesto. Such works have their purpose, and Froude's is an unusually eloquent specimen of its cla.s.s; but they are not history, any more than the speech of Lord Clare on the Union, or the Diary of Wolfe Tone. Froude does not explain, nor seem to understand, what the supporters of the Irish Legislature meant. Speaker Foster said that the whole unbribed intellect of Ireland was against the Union. Foster was the last Speaker in the Irish House of Commons. He had been elected in 1790 against the "patriot" Ponsonby, and was opposed to the Catholic franchise in 1793. He was a man of unblemished character, and in a position where he could not afford to talk nonsense. Yet, if Froude were right, nonsense he must have talked. Cornwallis, an Englishman, corroborates Foster; Cornwallis is disregarded. "All that was best and n.o.blest in Ireland" was gathered into the Orange a.s.sociation, which has been the plague of every Irish Government since the Union. Froude's model sovereign of Ireland, as of England, was George III., who ordered that in a Catholic country "a sharp eye should be kept on Papists," and would doubtless have joined an Orange Lodge himself if he had been an Irishman and a subject. The English in Ireland is reported to have been Parnell's favourite book. It made him, he said, a Home Ruler because it exposed the iniquities of the English Government. This was not Froude's princ.i.p.al object, but the testimony to his truthfulness is all the more striking on that account. Gladstone, who quoted from the English in Ireland when he introduced his Land Purchase Bill in 1886, paid a just tribute to the "truth and honour" of the writer.

If it be once granted that the Irish are a subject race, that the Catholic faith is a degrading superst.i.tion, and that Ireland is only saved from ruin by her English or Scottish settlers, Froude's book deserves little but praise. Although he did not study for it as he studied for his History of England he read and copied a large number of State Papers, with a great ma.s.s of official correspondence. Freeman would have been appalled at the idea of such research as Froude made in Dublin, and at the Record Office in London. But the scope of his book, and the thesis he was to develop, had formed themselves in his mind before he began. He was to vindicate the Protestant cause in Ireland, and to his own satisfaction he vindicated it. If I may apply a phrase coined many years afterwards, Froude a.s.sumed that Irish Catholics had taken a double dose of original sin. He always found in them enough vice to account for any persecution of which they might be the victims. Just as he could not write of Kerry without imputing failure and instability to O'Connell, so he could not write about Ireland without traducing the leaders of Irish opinion. They might be Protestants themselves; but they had Catholics for their followers, and that was enough. It was enough for Carlyle also, and to attack Froude's historical reputation is to attack Carlyle's. "I have read," Carlyle wrote on the 20th of June, 1874, "all your book carefully over again, and continue to think of it not less but rather more favourably than ever: a few little phrases and touches you might perhaps alter with advantage; and the want of a copious, carefully weighed concluding chapter is more sensible to me than ever; but the substance of the book is genuine truth, and the utterance of it is clear, sharp, smiting, and decisive, like a shining Damascus sabre; I never doubted or doubt but its effect will be great and lasting. No criticism have I seen since you went away that was worth notice. Poor Lecky is weak as water-bilge-water with a drop of formic acid in it: unfortunate Lecky, he is wedded to his Irish idols; let him alone." The reference to Lecky, as unfair as it is amusing, was provoked by a review of Froude in Macmillan's Magazine. There are worse idols than Burke, or even Grattan, and Lecky was an Irishman after all.

A very different critic from Carlyle expressed an equally favourable opinion.

"I have an interesting letter," Froude wrote to his friend Lady Derby, formerly Lady Salisbury, "from Bancroft the historian (American minister at Berlin) on the Irish book. He, I am happy to say, accepts the view which I wished to impress on the Americans, and he has sent me some curious correspondence from the French Foreign Office ill.u.s.trating and confirming one of my points. One evening last summer I met Lady Salisbury,* and told her my opinion of Lord Clare. She dissented with characteristic emphasis-and she is not a lady who can easily be moved from her judgments. Still, if she finds time to read the book I should like to hear that she can recognise the merits as well as the demerits of a statesman who, in the former at least, so nearly resembled her husband."

- * The wife of the late Prime Minister. -

In another letter he says:

"The meaning of the book as a whole is to show to what comes of forcing uncongenial inst.i.tutions on a country to which they are unsuited. If we had governed Ireland as we govern India, there would have been no confiscation, no persecution of religion, and consequently none of the reasons for disloyalty. Having chosen to set Parliament and an Established Church, and to the lands of the old owners, we left nothing undone to spoil the chances of success with the experiment."

Froude went to the United States with no very exalted opinion of the Irish; he returned with the lowest possible. "Like all Irish patriots," including Grattan, Wolfe Tone "would have accepted greedily any tolerable appointment from the Government which he had been execrating." The subsequent history of Ireland has scarcely justified this sweeping invective. "There are persons who believe that if the king had not interfered with Lord Fitzwilliam, the Irish Catholics would have accepted gratefully the religious equality which he was prepared to offer them, and would have remained thenceforward for all time contented citizens of the British Empire." So reasonable a theory requires more convincing refutation than a simple statement that it is "incredible." Incredible, no doubt, if the Catholics of Ireland were wild beasts, cringing under the whip, ferocious when released from restraint. Very credible indeed if Irish Catholics in 1795 were like other people, asking for justice, and not expecting an impossible ascendency. Interesting as Froude's narrative is, it becomes, when read together with Lecky's, more interesting still. Though indignant with Froude's aspersions upon the Irish race, Lecky did not allow himself to be hurried. He was writing a history of England as well as of Ireland, and the Irish chapters had to wait their turn. In Froude's book there are signs of haste; in Lecky's there are none. Without the brilliancy and the eloquence which distinguished Froude, Lecky had a power of marshalling facts that gave to each of them its proper value. No human being is without prejudice. But Lecky was curiously unlike the typical Irishman of Froude's imagination. He has written what is by general acknowledgment the fairest account of the Irish rebellion, and of the Union to which it led. Of the eight volumes which compose his History of England in the Eighteenth Century, two, the seventh and eighth, are devoted exclusively to Ireland.

After the publication of his first two volumes he made no direct reference to Froude, and contented himself with his own independent narrative. He vindicated the conduct of Lord Fitzwilliam, and traced to his recall in 1795 the desperate courses adopted by Irish Catholics. He showed that Froude had been unjust to the Whigs who gave evidence for Arthur O'Connor at Maidstone in 1798, and especially to Grattan. That O'Connor was engaged in treasonable correspondence with France there can be no doubt now. But he did not tell his secrets to his Whig friends, and what Grattan said of his never having heard O'Connor talk about a French invasion was undoubtedly true.* Froude's hatred of the English Whigs almost equalled his contempt for the Irish Catholics, and the two feelings prevented him from writing anything like an narrative either of the rebellion or of the Union. No other book of his shows such evident traces of having been written under the influence of Carlyle. Carlyle's horror of democracy, worship of force, his belief that martial law was the law of Almighty G.o.d, and that cruelty might always be perpetrated on the right side, are conspicuously displayed. If Froude spoke of the Roman Catholic Church, he always seemed to fancy himself back in the sixteenth century, when the murder of Protestants was regarded at the Vatican as justifiable. The Irish rebellion of 1798 was led by Protestants, like Lord Edward Fitzgerald, and free thinkers, like Wolfe Tone. But for the recall of Lord Fitzwilliam, the Catholics would have taken no part in it, and it would not have been more dangerous than the rebellion of 1848. Such at least was Lecky's opinion, supported by weighty arguments, and by facts which cannot be denied. If Froude's reputation as an historian depended upon his English in Ireland, it certainly would not stand high. Of course he had as much right to put the English case as Father Burke had to put the Irish one. But his responsibility was far greater, and his splendid talents might have been better employed than in reviving the mutual animosities of religion or of race.

- * See Froude's English in Ireland, vol. iii. pp. 320, 321; Lecky's History of England, vol. viii. p. 52.

- When Lecky reviewed, with much critical asperity, the last two volumes of Froude's English in Ireland for Macmillan's Magazine* he referred to Home Rule as a moderate and const.i.tutional movement. His own History was not completed till 1890. But when Gladstone introduced his first Home Rule Bill, in 1886, Lecky opposed it as strongly as Froude himself. Lecky was quite logical, for the question whether the Union had been wisely or legitimately carried had very little to do with the expedience of repealing it. Fieri non debuit, factum valet, may be common sense as well as good law. But Froude was not unnaturally triumphant to find his old antagonist in Irish matters on his side, especially as Freeman was a Home Ruler. Froude's att.i.tude was never for a moment doubtful. He had always held that the Irish people were quite unfitted for self-government, and of all English statesmen Gladstone was the one he trusted least. He had a theory that great orators were always wrong, even when, like Pitt and Fox, they were on opposite sides. Gladstone he doubly repudiated as a High Churchman and a Democrat. Yet, with more candour than consistency, he always declared that Gladstone was the English statesman who best understood the Irish Land Question, and so he plainly told the Liberal Unionists, speaking as one of themselves. He had praised Henry VIII for confiscating the Irish estates of absentees, and taunted Pitt with his unreasoning horror of an absentee tax. He would have given the Irish people almost everything rather than allow them to do anything for themselves. In 1880 he brought out another edition of his Irish book, with a new chapter on the crisis. The intervening years had made no difference in his estimate of Ireland, or of Irishmen. O'Connell, who had nothing to do with the politics of the eighteenth century, was "not sincere about repeal," although he "forced the Whigs to give him whatever he might please to ask for,"+ and he certainly asked for that.

- * June, 1874.

+ English in Ireland, 1881, vol. iii. p. 568.

- That Catholic emanc.i.p.ation was useless and mischievous, Froude never ceased to declare. He would have dragooned the Irish into Protestantism and made the three Catholic provinces into a Crown colony. The Irish establishment he regretted as a badge of Protestant ascendency. But he was a dangerous ally for Unionists. That the government of Ireland by what he called a Protestant Parliament sitting at Westminister, meaning the Parliament of the United Kingdom, had failed, he not merely admitted, but loudly proclaimed. It had failed "more signally, and more disgracefully," than any other system, because Gladstone admitted that Fenian outrages precipitated legislative reforms. The alternative was to rule Ireland, or let her be free, and altogether separate from Great Britain. Neither branch of the supposed alternative was within the range of practical politics. But on one point Froude unconsciously antic.i.p.ated the immediate future. "The remedy" for the agrarian troubles of Ireland was, he said, "the establishment of courts to which the tenant might appeal." The ink of this sentence was scarcely dry when the Irish Land Bill of 1881 appeared with that very provision. Froude was always ready and willing to promote the material benefit of Ireland. Irishmen, except the Protestant population of Ulster, were children to be treated with firmness and kindness, the truest kindness being never to let them have their own way.

CHAPTER VII

SOUTH AFRICA

Before Froude had written the last chapter of The English in Ireland he was visited by the greatest sorrow of his life. Mrs. Froude died suddenly in February, 1874. It had been a perfect marriage, and he never enjoyed the same happiness afterwards. Carlyle and his faithful friend Fitzjames Stephen were the only persons he could see at first, though he manfully completed the book on which he was engaged. It was long before he rallied from the shock, and he felt as if he could never write again. He dreaded "the length of years which might yet lie ahead of him before he could have his discharge from service." He took a melancholy pride in noting that none of the reviewers discovered any special defects in those final pages of his book which had been written under such terrible conditions. Mrs. Froude had thoroughly understood all her husband's moods, and her quiet humour always cheered him in those hours of gloom from which a man of his sensitive nature could not escape. She could use a gentle mockery which was always effective, along with her common sense, in bringing out the true proportions of things. Conscious as she was of his social brilliancy and success, she would often tell the children that they lost nothing by not going out with him, because their father talked better at home than he talked anywhere else. Her deep personal religion was the form of belief with which he had most sympathy, and which he best understood, regarding it as the foundation of virtue and conduct and honour and truth. He attended with her the services of the Church, which satisfied him whenever they were performed with the reverent simplicity familiar to his boyhood. Happily he was not left alone. He had two young children to love, and his eldest daughter was able to take her stepmother's place as mistress of his house. With the children he left London as soon as he could, and tried to occupy his mind by reading to them from Don Quixote, or, on a Sunday, from The Pilgrim's Progress. To the end of his life he felt his loss; and when he was offered, fifteen years later, the chance of going back to his beloved Derreen, he shrank from the a.s.sociations it would have recalled.

He took a house for his family in Wales, which he described in the following letter to Lady Derby:

"CROGAN HOUSE, Corwen, June 3rd, 1874.

"I do not know if I told you upon what a curious and interesting old place we have fallen for our retirement. The walls of the room in which I am writing are five feet thick. The old part of the house must have been an Abbey Grange; the cellars run into a British tumulus, the oaks in the grounds must many of them be as old as the Conquest, and the site of the parish church was a place of pilgrimage probably before Christianity. Stone coffins are turned over on the hillsides in making modern improvements. Denfil Gadenis' (the mediaeval Welsh saint's) wooden horn still stands in the church porch, and the sense of strangeness and antiquity is the more palpable because hardly a creature in the valley, except the cows and the birds, speak in a language familiar to me. It was Owen Glendower's country. Owen himself doubtless has many times ridden down the avenue. We are in the very heart of Welsh nationality, which was always a respectable thing-far more so than the Celticism of the Gaels and Irish. We are apt to forget that the Tudors were Welsh." Fortunately a plan suggested itself which gave him variety of occupation and change of scene. Disraeli's Government had just come into office, and with the Colonial Secretary, Lord Carnarvon, Froude was on intimate terms. Froude had always been interested in the Colonies, and was an advocate of Federation long before it had become a popular scheme. As early as 1870 he wrote to Skelton:

"Gladstone and Co. deliberately intend to shake off the Colonies. They are privately using their command of the situation to make the separation inevitable."* I do not know what this means. Lord Dufferin has left it on record that after his appointment to Canada in 1872 Lowe came up to him at the club, and said, "Now, you ought to make it your business to get rid of the Dominion." But Lowe was in the habit of saying paradoxical things, and it was Disraeli, not Gladstone, who spoke of the Colonies as millstones round our necks. Cardwell, the Secretary for War, withdrew British troops from Canada and New Zealand, holding that the self-governing Colonies should be responsible for their own defence. That wise policy fostered union rather than separation, by providing that the working cla.s.ses at home should not be taxed for the benefit of their colonial fellow- subjects. Lord Carnarvon himself had pa.s.sed in 1867 the Bill which federated Canada and which his Liberal predecessor had drawn. He was now anxious to carry out a similar scheme in South Africa, and Froude offered to find out for him how the land lay. His visit was not to be in any sense official. He would be ostensibly travelling for his health, which was always set up by a voyage. He was interested in extending to South Africa Miss Rye's benevolent plans of emigration to Canada; in the treatment of a Kaffir chief called Langalibalele; and in the disputes which had arisen from the annexation of the Diamond Fields. Thus there were reasons for his trip enough and to spare. He would, it was thought, be more likely to obtain accurate information if the princ.i.p.al purpose of his visit were kept in the background.

- *Table Talk of Shirley, p. 142. -

There was one great and fundamental difference between the case of Canada and the case of South Africa. Canada had itself asked for federation, and Parliament simply gave effect to the wish of the Canadians. Opinion in South Africa was notoriously divided, and the centre of opposition was at Cape Town. Natal had not yet obtained a full measure of self-government, and the lieutenant-Governor, Sir Benjamin Pine, had excited indignation among all friends of the natives by arbitrary imprisonment, after a mock trial, of a Kaffir chief. Lord Carnarvon had carefully to consider this case, and also to decide whether the mixed Const.i.tution of Natal, which would not work, should be reformed or annulled. A still more serious difficulty was connected with the Diamond Fields, officially known as Griqualand West. The ownership of this district had been disputed between the Orange Free State and a native chief called Nicholas Waterboer. In 1872 Lord Kimberley, as Secretary of State for the Colonies, had purchased it from Waterboer at a price ludicrously small in proportion to its value, and it had since been annexed to the British dominions by the Governor, Sir Henry Barkly. Waterboer, who knew nothing about the value of money, was satisfied. The Orange State vehemently protested, and President Brand denounced the annexation as a breach of faith. Not only, he said, were the Diamond Fields within the limits of his Republic; the agreement between Waterboer and the Secretary of State was itself a breach of the Orange River Convention, by which Great Britain undertook not to negotiate with any native chief north of the River Vaal. Lord Kimberley paid no heed to Brand's remonstrances. He denied altogether the validity of the Dutch claim, and he would not hear of arbitration. By the time that Lord Carnarvon came into office thousands of British settlers were digging for diamonds in Griqualand West, and its abandonment was impossible. Brand himself did not wish to take the responsibility of governing it. But he continued to press the case for compensation, and the British Government, which had forced independence upon the Boers, appeared in the invidious light of shirking responsibility while grasping at mineral wealth. If it had not been for this untoward incident, the Dutch Republics would have been more favourable to Lord Carnarvon's policy than Cape Colony was. The Transvaal was imperfectly protected against the formidable power of the Zulus, and a general rising of blacks against whites was the real danger which threatened South Africa.

That peril, however, was felt more acutely in Natal than in Cape Colony. The Cape had for two years enjoyed responsible government, and its first Prime Minister was John Charles Molteno.

Molteno was not in any other respect a remarkable man. He had come to the post by adroit management of a miscellaneous community, comprising British, Dutch, and Kaffirs. He was personally incorruptible, and he played the game according to the rules. He would have called himself, and so far as his opportunities admitted, he was, a const.i.tutional statesman, justly proud of the position to which his own qualities had raised him, and extremely jealous of interference Downing Street. He had no responsibility, he was never tired of explaining, for the acquisition of the Diamond Fields, and he left the Colonial Office to settle that matter with President Brand. Local politics were his business. He did not look beyond the House of a.s.sembly at Cape Town, which it was his duty to lead, and the Governor, Sir Henry Barkly, with whom he was on excellent terms. His own origin, which was partly English and partly Italian, made it easy for him to be impartial between the two white races in South Africa. For the Kaffirs he had no great tenderness. They had votes, and if they chose to sell them for brandy that was their own affair. Of what would now be called Imperialism Molteno had no trace. He would support Federation when in his opinion it suited the interests of Cape Colony, and not an hour before.

Froude left Dartmouth in the Walmer Castle on the 23rd of August, 1874. He occupied himself during the voyage partly in discussing the affairs of the Cape with his fellow-pa.s.sengers, and partly in reading Greek. The "Leaves from a South African Journal," which close the third volume of Short Studies, describe his journey in his most agreeably colloquial style. A piece of literary criticism adorns the entry for September 4th. "I have been feeding hitherto on Greek plays: this morning I took Homer instead, and the change is from a hot-house to the open air. The Greek dramatists, even Aeschylus himself, are burdened with a painful consciousness of the problems of human life, with perplexed theories of Fate and Providence. Homer is fresh, free, and salt as the ocean."

No sooner had Froude landed at Cape Town than he began tracing all its evils to responsible government. The solidity of the houses reminded him that they were built under an absolute system. "What is it which has sent our Colonies into so sudden a frenzy for what they call political liberty?" A movement which has been in steady progress for thirty years can scarcely be called sudden, even though it be regarded as a frenzy, and so far back as 1776 there were British colonists beyond the seas who attached some practical value to freedom. A drive across the peninsula of Table Mountain suggested equally positive reflections of another kind. "Were England wise in her generation, a line of forts from Table Bay to False Bay would be the northern limit of her Imperial responsibilities."

This had been the cherished policy of Lord Grey at the Colonial Office, and the Whigs generally inclined to the same view. But it was already obsolete. Lord Kimberley had proceeded on exactly the opposite principle, and Lord Carnarvon's object in Federation was certainly not to diminish the area of the British Empire.

If Froude talked in South Africa as he wrote in his journal, his conversation must have been more interesting than discreet. "Every one," he wrote from Port Elizabeth, on the 27th of September, 1874, "approves of the action of the Natal Government in the Langalibalele affair. I am told that if Natal is irritated it may pet.i.tion to relinquish the British connection, and to be allowed to join the Free States. I cannot but think that it would have been a wise policy, when the Free States were thrown off, to have attached Natal to them." Lord Carnarvon disapproved of the Natal Government's action, released Langalibalele, and recalled the Lieutenant- Governor. His policy was as wise as it was courageous, and no proposal to relinquish the British connection followed. Froude was a firm believer in the Dutch method of dealing with Kaffirs, and he had no more prejudice against slavery than Carlyle himself. But his sense of justice was offended by the treatment of Langalibalele, and if he had been Secretary of State he would have done as Lord Carnarvon did. With the Boers Froude had a good deal of sympathy. Their religion, a purer Calvinism than existed even in Scotland, appealed to his deepest sentiments, and he admired the austere simplicity of their lives. No one could accuse a Cape Dutchman of complicity in such horrors as progress and the march of intellect. On his way from Cape Town to Durban Froude was told a characteristic story of a Dutch farmer. "His estate adjoined the Diamond Fields. Had he remained where he was, he could have made a large fortune. Milk, b.u.t.ter, poultry, eggs, vegetables, fruit, went up to fabulous prices. The market was his own to demand what he pleased. But he was disgusted at the intrusion upon his solitude. The diggers worried him from morning to night, demanding to buy, while he required his farm produce for his own family. He sold his land, in his impatience, for a tenth of what he might have got had he cared to wait and bargain, mounted his wife and children into his waggon, and moved off into the wilderness." Froude's sarcastic comment is not less characteristic than the story. "Which was the wisest man, the Dutch farmer or the Yankee who was laughing at him? The only book that the Dutchman had ever read was the Bible, and he knew no better."*

- * Short Studies, iii. 497. -

The state of Natal, which was then perplexing the Colonial Office, puzzled Froude still more. Four courses seemed to him possible. Natal might be annexed to Cape Colony, made a province of a South African Federation, governed despotically by a soldier, or left to join the Dutch Republics. The fifth course, which was actually taken, of giving it responsible government by stages, did not come within the scope of his ideas. The difficulty of Federation lay, as it seemed to him, in the native problem.

"If we can make up our minds to allow the colonists to manage the natives their own way, we may safely confederate the whole country. The Dutch will be in the majority, and the Dutch method of management will more or less prevail. They will be left wholly to themselves for self-defence, and prudence will prevent them from trying really harsh or aggressive measures. In other respects the Dutch are politically conservative, and will give us little trouble." If, on the other hand, native policy was to be directed from home, or, in other words, if adequate precautions were to be taken against slavery, a federal system would be useless, and South Africa must be governed like an Indian province.

Pretoria Froude found full of English, loudly demanding annexation. He told them, speaking of course only for himself, that it was impossible, because the Cape was a self-governing Colony, and the Dutch majority "would take any violence offered to their kinsmen in the Republics as an injury to themselves." To annexation without violence, by consent of the Boers, the great obstacle, so Froude found, was the seizure, the fraudulent seizure, as they thought it, of the Diamond Fields. He visited Kimberley, called after the Colonial Secretary who acquired it, "like a squalid Wimbledon Camp set down in an arid desert." The method of digging for diamonds was then primitive.

"Each owner works by himself or with his own servants. He has his own wire rope, and his own basket, by which he sends his stuff to the surface to be washed. The rim of the pit is fringed with windla.s.ses. The descending wire ropes stretch from them thick as gossamers on an autumn meadow. The system is as demoralising as it is ruinous. The owner cannot be ubiquitous: if he is with his working cradle, his servants in the pit steal his most valuable stones and secrete them. Forty per cent of the diamonds discovered are supposed to be lost in this way."* The proportion of profit between employer and employed seems to have been fairer than usual, though it might, no doubt, have been more regularly arranged.

At Bloemfontein Froude called on President Brand, "a resolute, stubborn-looking man, with a frank, but not over-conciliatory, expression of face." Brand was in no conciliatory mood. He held that his country had been robbed of land which the British Government renounced in 1854, and only resumed now because diamonds had been discovered on it. The interview, however, was neither unimportant nor unsatisfactory. It was followed by an invitation to dinner, and frank discussion of the whole subject. So firmly convinced was Froude of the President's good faith and of the injustice done him that he pleaded the cause of the Free State with the Colonial Office, and Lord Carnarvon settled the dispute in a friendly manner by the payment of a reasonable sum.+ But that was not till 1876, after Brand had visited London, and seen Lord Carnarvon himself.

- * Short Studies, vol. iii. p. 537. + 90,000 lbs. -

At the end of 1874 Froude returned to England, and reported to Lord Carnarvon what he had observed. The Colonial Secretary, just, but punctilious, was unwilling to reverse Lord Kimberley's policy, and Froude discovered that party politics, to which he traced all our woes, had much less to do with administration than he imagined. Under the influence of Bishop Colenso, an intrepid friend of the natives, Lord Carnarvon had already interfered on behalf of Langalibalele, but that only involved overruling the Government of Natal. After mature consideration he wrote a despatch to Sir Henry Barkly in which stress was laid upon the importance of arranging all differences with the Orange State. Then he proceeded to the subject of Federation, which was always in his mind and at his heart. Here he unfortunately failed to make allowance for the sensitive pride of Colonial statesmen. He proposed the a.s.semblage of a Federal Conference at Cape Town, at which Froude would represent the Colonial Office. For Cape Colony he suggested the names of the Prime Minister, Molteno, and of Paterson, who led the Opposition.

In June, 1875, Froude went back to South Africa, this time as an acknowledged emissary of the Government, but by ill luck his arrival coincided with the receipt of the despatch. The effect of this doc.u.ment was prodigious. Molteno considered that he had been personally insulted. The Legislative a.s.sembly was defiant, and greeted the recital of Carnarvon's words with ironical laughter. A Ministerial Minute, signed by Molteno and his colleagues, protested against the Colonial Secretary's intrusion, and especially against his rather ill advised reference to a proposed separation of the eastern from the western provinces of the Cape. It was a fact that Port Elizabeth and Grahamstown, where there were very few Dutch, considered that they paid proportionately too much towards the colonial revenues, and desired separate treatment. But the people of Cape Town strongly objected, and it was unwise for the Secretary of State to take a side in local politics. Froude found his position by no means agreeable. Molteno, though never discourteous, received him coldly, and objected to his making speeches. The Governor, who liked to be good friends with his Ministers, gave him no encouragement. The House of a.s.sembly, after proposing to censure Carnarvon in their haste, censured Froude at their leisure. That did him no harm. But he disliked the new position in which he found himself, and in his private journal he expressed his sentiments freely.

He had not been long in Cape Town when he wrote, on the 9th of July, 1875, to his eldest daughter a full and vivid account of the political situation. "I am glad," he said, "that no one is with me who cares for me. No really good thing can be carried out without disturbing various interests. The Governor and Parliament have set themselves against Lord Carnarvon. The whole country has declared itself enthusiastically for him. The consequence is that the opposition, who are mortified and enraged, now daily pour every sort of calumny on my unfortunate head. I don't read more of it than I can help, but some things I am forced to look at in order to answer; and the more successful my mission promises to be, the more violent and unscrupulous become those whose pockets are threatened by it. I wait in Cape Town till the next English steamer arrives, and then I mean to start for a short tour in the neighbourhood. I shall make my way by land to Mossel Bay, and then go on by sea to Port Elizabeth and Natal, where I shall wait for orders from home. Sir Garnet* has written me a very affectionate letter, inviting me to stay with him. Here the authorities begin to be more respectful than they were. Last night there was a State Dinner at Government House, when I took in Lady Barkly. Miss Barkly would hardly speak to me. I don't wonder. She is devoted to her father; I would do exactly the same in her place. I sent you a paper with an account of the dinner, and my speech, but you must not think that the dinner represented Cape Town society generally. Cape Town society, up to the reception at Government House, has regarded me as some portentous object come here to set the country on fire, and to be regarded with tremors by all respectable people. Outside Cape Town, on the contrary, in every town in the country, Dutch or English, I should be carried through the streets on the people's shoulders if I would only allow it, so you see I am in an 'unexampled situation.'+ The Governor's dinner cards had on them 'to meet Mr. Froude.' I am told that no less than eight people who were invited refused in mere terror of me .... Things are in a wild state here, and grow daily wilder. I am responsible for having lighted the straw; and if Lord Carnarvon has been frightened at the first bad news, there will be danger of real disturbance. The despatch has created a real enthusiasm, and excited hopes which must not now be disappointed." "Never," he wrote a few weeks afterwards, "never did a man of letters volunteer into a more extraordinary position than that in which I find myself." Sir Garnet Wolseley stood by him through thick and thin. After Sir Garnet's departure he had no English friend. His local supporters were "all looking out for themselves," and there was not one among them in whom he could feel any real confidence."

- * The present Lord Wolseley.

+ A favourite expression with Mrs. Carlyle.

- Of Molteno he made no personal complaint, and he always considered him the fittest man for his post in South Africa. But Colonial politicians as a whole were "not gentlemen with whom it was agreeable to be forced into contact." To give the Colony responsible government has been "an act of deliberate insanity" on the part of Lord Kimberley and the Liberal Cabinet. Froude endeavoured loyally and faithfully to carry out the policy of the Colonial Office, and his relations with Lord Carnarvon were relations of unbroken confidence. His objects were purely unselfish and patriotic. It was his misfortune rather than his fault to become involved in local politics, from which it was essential for the success of his mission that he should keep entirely aloof. Circ.u.mstances brought him into much greater favour with the Dutch than with his own countrymen, for it was thought, not without reason, that he had brought Carnarvon round to see the truth about the Diamond Fields and the Free State. He made them speeches, and they received him with enthusiasm. With Molteno, on the other hand, he found it impossible to act, and the Governor supported Molteno. Barkly was not unfavourable to Federation. But he perceived that it could not be forced upon a self-governing Colony, and that he himself would be powerless unless he acted in harmony with his const.i.tutional advisers. He, as well as Molteno, refused to attend the dinner at which Froude on his arrival was entertained in Cape Town. Molteno advised Froude not to go, or if he went, not to speak. Froude, however, both went and spoke, claiming as an Englishman the right of free speech in a British Colony. The right was of course incontestable. The expediency was a very different matter. Froude was not accustomed to public speaking, and only long experience can teach that most difficult part of the process, the instinctive avoidance of what should not be said. His brilliant lectures were all read from ma.n.u.script, and he had never been in the habit of thinking on his legs. In 1874 he could at least say that he spoke only for himself. In 1875 he committed the Colonial Office, and even the Cabinet, to his own personal opinions, which were not in favour of Parliamentary Government as understood either by Englishmen or by Africanders. He was accused of getting up a popular agitation on behalf of the Imperial authorities against the Governor of the Colony, his Ministers, and the Legislative a.s.sembly of the Cape. He did in fact, under a strong sense of duty, urge Carnarvon to recall Barkly, and to subst.i.tute for him Sir Garnet Wolseley, who had temporarily taken over the administration of Natal.

Sir Garnet, however, had no such ambition. Soldiering was the business of his life, and he had had quite enough of const.i.tutionalism in Natal. Barkly was for the present maintained, and Froude regarded his maintenance as fatal to Federation. But Sir Bartle Frere, who succeeded him, was not more fortunate, and the real mistake was interference from home. To Froude his experience of South Africa came as a disagreeable shock. A pa.s.sionate believer in Greater Britain, in the expansion of England, in the energy, resources, and prospects of the Queen's dominions beyond the seas, the parochialism of Cape Colony astonished and perplexed him. While he was dreaming of a Federated Empire, and Paterson were counting heads in the Cape a.s.sembly, and considering what would be the political result if the eastern provinces set up for themselves. If South Africa were federated, would Cape Town remain the seat of government? To Froude such a question was paltry and trivial. To a Cape Town shopkeeper it loomed as large as Table Mountain. The att.i.tude of Molteno's Ministry, on the other hand, seemed as ominous to him as it seemed obvious to the Colonists. He thought it fatal to the unity of the Empire, and amounting to absolute independence. He did not understand the people with whom he had to deal. Most of them were as loyal subjects as himself, and never contemplated for a moment secession from the Empire. All they claimed was complete freedom to manage their own affairs, to federate or not to federate, as they pleased and when they pleased. They had only just acquired full const.i.tutional rights; and if they sometimes exaggerated the effect of them, the error was venial. If Carnarvon, instead of writing for publication an elaborate and official despatch, had explained his policy to the Governor in private letters, and directed him to sound Molteno in confidence, the Cape Ministers might themselves have proposed a scheme; and if they had proposed it, it would have been carried. Had Froude said nothing at dinners, or on platforms, he might have exercised far more influence behind the scenes. But he was an enthusiast for Federation by means of a South African Conference, and he made a proselytising tour through the Colony. The Dutch welcomed him because he acknowledged their rights. At Grahamstown too, and at Port Elizabeth, he was hailed as the champion of separation for the eastern provinces. The Legislative a.s.sembly at Cape Town, however, was hostile, and the proposed conference fell through. Lord Carnarvon did not see the full significance of the fact that the Confederation of Canada had been first mooted within the Dominion itself.