While he was at Boston Froude saw a great fire, and his description of it is hardly inferior to the best things in his best books. He was staying with George Peabody, equally well known in England and the United States as a philanthropist, "one of the sweetest and gentlest of beings." "As we were sitting after dinner, the children said there was a fire somewhere. They heard the alarm bell, and saw a red light in the sky. Presently we saw flames. Mr. Peabody was uneasy, and I walked out with him to see. Between the house here and the town lies the Common or City Park. As we crossed this, the signs became more ominous. We made our way into the principal street through the crowd, and then, looking down a cross street full of enormous warehouses, saw both sides of it in flames. The streets were full of steam fire-engines, all roaring and playing, but the houses were so high and large, and the volumes of fire so prodigious, that their water-jets looked like so many squirts. As we stood, we saw the fire grow. Block caught after block. I myself saw one magnificent store catch at the lower windows. In a few seconds the flame ran up storey after storey, spouting out at the different landings as it rose. It reached the roof with a spring, and the place was gone. There was nothing to stop it. Our people were sure that it would be another Chicago. The night was fine and frosty, with a light north-easterly breeze against which the fire was advancing. We stayed an hour or two. There seemed no danger for Mr. Peabody's bank. He was evidently, however, extremely harassed and anxious, as he held the bonds of innumerable merchants whose property was being destroyed. I thought I was in his way, and left him, and came home to tell the family what was going on. After I left the fire travelled faster than ever. Huge rolls of smoke swelled up fold after fold. The under folds crimson and glowing yellow from the flames below, sparks flying up like rocket stars. A petroleum store caught, and the flames ran about in rivers, and above all the steel blue moon shone through the rents of the rolling vapour, and the stars with an intensity of brilliant calm such as we never see in England. It was a night to be eternally remembered."
A great many Irish families were made homeless by this fire, and Froude subscribed seven hundred dollars for their relief, thereby encouraging the rumour that he was in the pay of the British Minister whom he disliked and distrusted most. Froude's final view of America and Americans was in some respects less favourable than his first impressions. He was struck by the difference between their public and private treatment of himself, between their conversation and the articles in their press. "From what I see of the Eastern States I do not anticipate any very great things as likely to come out of the Americans. Their physical frames seem hung together rather than organically grown …. They are generous with their money, have much tenderness and quiet good feeling; but the Anglo- Saxon power is running to seed, and I don't think will revive. Puritanism is dead, and the collected sternness of temperament which belonged to it is dead also."
This language seems strange, written as it was only seven years after the great war. Froude, however, considered that there was much hysterical passion in the policy of the North, and he shared Carlyle's dislike of democratic institutions. Moreover, he was disappointed with the result of his mission. The case seemed so clear to him that he could not understand why it should seem less clear to others. He believed that if the priests could have been driven out of Ireland by William of Orange, the more fanatical Catholics would have followed them, and Ireland would have become prosperous, contented, and loyal. To an American Republican such ideas were as repugnant as they were to an Irish Catholic. An American could understand the argument that Home Rule was impracticable, because a Federal Constitution did not apply to the circumstances of the United Kingdom. He would not readily believe that the Irish were by nature incapable of self-government, or that Englishmen must know better what was good for them than they knew themselves. For Cromwell he could make allowance. The Protector had to deal with a Catholicism which would have made an end of him and restored Charles II. But times had changed. Catholics had abandoned persecution, and ought not to be punished the sins of their fathers. The Irish did not claim, as the Southern States had claimed, the right to secede, but to exercise the powers inherent in every State of the American Union.
Carlyle warmly approved of Froude's undertaking, and persisted in believing that it had done good by forcing the American public to see that there were two sides to the historic question, an English side as well as an Irish one. He was so far right, and with that qualified success Froude had to be content. His champion, whose opinion was more to him than any other, than any number of others, wrote to Mrs. Froude on the 5th of December, 1872: "The rest of the affair, all that loud whirlwind of Bully Burke, Saturday Review and Co., both at home and abroad, I take to be, in essence, absolutely nothing; and to deserve from him no more regard than the barking of dogs, or the braying of asses. He may depend on it, what he is saying about Ireland is the genuine truth, or the nearest to it that has ever been said by any person whatever; and I hope he knows long ere this (if he likes to consider it) that the truth alone is anything, and all the circumambient balderdash and whirlwinds of nonsense tumbling round it are, and eternally remain, nothing. Tell him I have read his book, and know others that have read it with attention; and that their and my clear opinion is as above. To myself there is a ring in it as of clear steel; and my prophecy is that all the roaring blockheads of the world cannot prevent its natural effect on human souls. Sooner or later all persons will have to believe it." Carlyle seldom qualified his approval, and his earnest advocacy was to Froude a recompense beyond all price.
The first volume of Froude's English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, to which Carlyle refers, had been published at home while the author was lecturing on the Irish question to the people of the United States. Like the lectures, on a more thorough and comprehensive scale, it is a bold indictment of the Irish nation. Froude could not write without a purpose, nor forget that he was an Englishman and a Protestant. Before he had finished a single chapter of his new book he had stated in uncompromising language his opinion of the Irish race. "Passionate in everything—passionate in their patriotism, passionate in their religion, passionately courageous, passionately loyal and affectionate—they are without the manliness which would give strength and solidity to the sentimental part of their dispositions; while the surface and show is so seductive and winning that only experience of its instability can resist its charm."* Such summary judgments are seldom accurate. Every one must be acquainted with individual Irishmen who do not correspond with Froude's general description. Nor does Froude always take into account the shrewdness, the humour, the genius for politics, which have distinguished Irishmen throughout the world. Impressed with this view of the Irish character, he held that forbearance in dealing with Irish rebellions was misplaced, that Irishmen respected only an authority with which they durst not trifle, and that universal confiscation should have followed the defeat of Shan O'Neill.
— * Vol. i, pp. 21, 22, —
These, however, were preliminary matters. When he came to the eighteenth century Froude had to consider details, and here his prejudice against Catholicism led him astray. In the reign of George II. acts of lawless violence were not uncommon on this side of the Channel, and Richardson's Clarissa was read with a credulity which showed that abduction could be committed without being followed by punishment. In parts of Ireland it was not an infrequent offence, and Froude collected some abominable cases, which he described in his picturesque way.* As examples of disregard for humanity, and contempt for law, he was fully justified in citing them. But he endeavoured to throw responsibility for these outrages on the Roman Catholic Church. "Young gentlemen," he says, "of the Catholic persuasion were in the habit of recovering equivalents for the lands of which they considered themselves to have been robbed, and of recovering souls at the same time by carrying off young Protestant girls of fortune to the mountains, ravishing them with the most exquisite brutality, and then compelling them to go through a form of marriage, which a priest was always in attendance ready to celebrate."+ This is a very serious charge, perhaps as serious a charge as could well be made against a religious communion. It was an accusation improbable on the face of it; for while the Church of Rome in the course of her strange, eventful history has tampered with the sixth commandment, as Protestants call it, she has never underrated the virtue of chastity, and has always proclaimed a high standard of sexual morals. In his zeal to justify the penal laws against Catholics Froude accepted without sufficient inquiry evidence which could only have satisfied one willing to believe the worst.
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* English in Ireland, vol. i. pp. 417-434.
+ Ibid., p. 417.
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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 ejaculations 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 mass. 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.