Mr. Froude announced that his object in coming to America was to
enlighten the American public as to the true nature of Irish
discontent, in such manner that American opinion, acting on Irish
opinion, would reconcile the Irish to the English connection, and
turn their attention to practical remedies for whatever was wrong
in their condition--American opinion being now, in Irish eyes,
the court of last resort in all political controversies. It is
casting no reflection on the historical or literary value of his
lectures to say that Mr. Froude, in proposing to himself any such
undertaking, fell into error as to the kind of audience he was
likely to command, and as to the nature of the impression he was
likely to make. The class of persons who listen to him is one of
great intelligence and respectability, but it is a class to which
the Irish are not in the habit of listening, and which has
already formed as unfavorable opinions about the political
character of the Irish as Mr. Froude could wish. He will be
surrounded during his whole tour by a public to whose utterances
the Irish pay no more attention than to the preachings of Mr.
Newdegate or Mr. Whalley, and who have long ago reached, from
their observation of the influence of the Irish immigration on
American politics, the very conclusions for which Mr. Froude
proposes to furnish historical justification. In short, he is
addressing people who have either already made up their minds, or
whose minds have no value for the purpose of his mission.
On the other hand, he will not reach at all the political class
which panders to Irish hatred of England, and, if he does reach
it, he will produce no effect on it. Not one speech the less will
be uttered, or article the less written, in encouragement of
Fenianism in consequence of anything he may say. Indeed, the idea
that the Bankses will be more careful in their Congressional
reports, or the Coxes or Mortons in their political harangues,
either after or before election, in consequence of Mr. Froude's
demonstration of the groundlessness of Fenian complaints, is one
which to "the men inside politics" must be very amusing.
We think, however, we can safely go a little further than this,
and say that however much light he may throw on the troubled
waters of Irish history, his deductions will not find a ready
acceptance among thinking Americans. The men who will heartily
agree with him in believing that the Irish have, on the whole,
only received their due, are not, as a rule, fair exponents of
the national temper or of the tendencies of the national mind.
Those who listened on Friday night last to his picturesque
account of the Elizabethan and Cromwellian attempts to pacify
Ireland, must have felt in their bones that--in spite of the
cheers which greeted some of his own more eloquent and some of
his bolder passages, and in particular his dauntless way of
dealing with the Drogheda Massacre--his political philosophy was
not one which the average American could be got to carry home
with him and ponder and embrace. Mr. Froude, it must in justice
to him be said, by no means throws all the responsibility of
Irish misery on Ireland. He deals out a considerable share of
this responsibility to England, but then his mode of apportioning
it is one which is completely opposed to most of the fundamental
notions of American politics. For instance, his whole treatment
of Irish history is permeated by an idea which, whatever marks it
may have left on American practice in dealing with the Indians,
has no place now in American political philosophy--we mean what
is called in English politics "the imperial idea"--the idea, that
is, that a strong, bold, and courageous race has a sort of
"natural right" to invade the territory of weak, semi-civilized,
and distracted races, and undertake the task of governing them by
such methods as seem best, and at such cost of life as may be
necessary. This idea is a necessary product of English history;
it is not likely to disappear in England as long as she possesses
such a school for soldiers and statesmen as is furnished by
India. Indeed, she could not stay in India without some such
theory to support her troops, but it is not one which will find a
ready acceptance here. American opinion has, within the last
twenty years, run into the very opposite extreme, and now
maintains with some tenacity the right even of barbarous
communities to be let alone and allowed to work out their own
salvation or damnation in their own way. There is little or no
faith left in this country in the value of superimposed
civilization, or of "superior minds," or of higher organization,
while there is a deep suspicion of, or we might say there is deep
hostility toward, all claims to rule based on alleged superiority
of race or creed or class. We doubt if Mr. Froude could have hit
on a more unpalatable mode, or a mode more likely to clash with
the prevailing tendencies of American opinion, of defending
English rule in Ireland than the argument that, Englishmen being
stronger and wiser than Irishmen, Irishmen ought to submit to
have themselves governed on English ideas whether they like it or
not. He has produced this argument already in England, and it has
elicited there a considerable amount of indignant protest. We are
forced to say of it here that it is likely to do great mischief,
over and above the total defeat of Mr. Froude's object in coming
to this country. The Irish in America are more likely to be
exasperated by it than the Irish at home, and we feel sure that
no native American will ever venture to use it to an Irish
audience.
There is one other point to which Mr. Froude's attention ought to
be called, as likely seriously to diminish the political weight
of his exposition of the causes of Irish discontent. The sole
justification of a conquest, even of a conquest achieved over
barbarians by a civilized people, is that it supplies good
government--that is, protection for life and property. Unless it
does this, no picture, however dark, of the discords and disorder
and savagery of the conquered can set the conqueror right at the
bar of civilized opinion. Therefore, the shocking and carefully
darkened pictures of the social and political degradation of the
native Irish in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth
centuries with which Mr. Froude is furnishing us, are available
for English vindication only on the supposition that the
invasion, even if it destroyed liberty, brought with it law and
order. But according to Mr. Froude's eloquent confession, it
brought nothing of the kind.
Queen Elizabeth made the first serious attempt to subjugate
Ireland, but she did it, Mr. Froude tells us, with only a handful
of English soldiers--who acted as auxiliaries to Irish clans
engaged on the queen's instigation in mutual massacre. After
three years of this sort of thing, the whole southern portion of
the island was reduced, to use Mr. Froude's words, "to a smoking
wilderness," men, women, and children having been remorselessly
slaughtered; but no attempt whatever was then made to establish
either courts or police, or any civil rule of any kind. Society
was left in a worse condition than before. Why was this? Because,
says Mr. Froude, the English Constitution made no provision for
the maintenance of a standing army for any such purpose.
The second attempt was made by Cromwell. He slaughtered the
garrisons of Drogheda and Wexford, and scattered the armies of
the various Irish factions, but he made no more attempt to police
the island than Elizabeth. The only mode of establishing order
resorted to by the Commonwealth was the wholesale confiscation of
the land, and its distribution among the officers and soldiers of
the army, the natives of all ages and sexes being driven into
Connaught. The "policing" was then left to be done by the new
settlers, each man with the strong hand, on his own account. The
third attempt was made by William III., who also followed the
Cromwellian plan, and left the island to be governed during the
following century by the military adventurers who had entered
into possession of the soil.
The excuse for not endeavoring to set up an honest and efficient
government remained the same in all three cases; the absence of
an army, or occupation elsewhere. In other words, the conquest
from first to last wanted the only justification which any
conquest can have. England found the Irish much in the same stage
of social and political progress in which Caesar found the Gauls,
destitute of nearly all the elements of political organization;
but instead of founding a political system, and maintaining it,
she interfered for century after century only to subjugate and
lay waste, and set the natives by the ears. Mr. Froude's answer
to this is, that if the Irish had been better men they could
easily have driven the English out, which is perhaps a good
reason for not bestowing much pity on the Irish, but it is not a
good reason for telling the Irish they ought not to hate England.
No pity can be made welcome which is ostentatiously mingled with
contempt. It is quite true, to our minds, that during the last
fifty years England has supplied the Irish with a better
government than the Irish could provide for themselves within the
next century at least.
There is no doubt of the substantial value of the English connection
to Ireland _now_; but there is just as little that in the past
history of this connection there is reason enough for Irish
suspicion and dislike. The tenacity of the Irish memory, too, is one
of the great political defects and misfortunes of the race.
Inability to forget past "wrongs" in the light of present
prosperity, is a sure sign of the absence of the political sense;
and that the Irish are wanting in the political sense no candid man
can deny. That they are really still, to a considerable extent, in
the tribal stage of progress, there is little doubt. But they are
surrounded by ideas, and institutions, and influences which make it
useless to try to raise them out of that stage by the "imperial"
method of government, or, in other words, by trying to persuade them
that they have richly deserved all their misfortunes, and that the
best thing they can do is to let a superior race mould their
destinies. If it were possible for Englishmen to be a little more
patient with their weaknesses, to yield a little more to the
childish vanities and aspirations which form the nearest approach
they have yet made to a feeling of nationality, and take upon
themselves in word as well as in deed their share of the horrible
burdens of Irish history, it would do more toward winning them Irish
confidence than anything Americans are ever likely to say.