One valuable truth Froude had learned not from Carlyle, but from study of the past, and from his own observation at the Cape. "If," he wrote in Caesar, "there be one lesson which history clearly teaches, it is this, that free nations" cannot govern subject provinces. If they are unable or unwilling to admit their dependencies to share their constitution, the constitution itself will fall in pieces from mere incompetence for its duties." A critic in The Quarterly Review expressed a hope that this would not prove to be true of India. But Froude was not thinking of India. He had in his mind the self-governing Colonies, whose fortunes and future were to him a source of perpetual interest. He loved travel, and as soon as he had shaken off the burden of Carlyle he took a voyage round the world, described, not always with topical accuracy, in Oceana. The name of this delightful volume is of course taken from Harrington, More's successor in the days of the Commonwealth. The contents were a characteristic mixture of history, speculation, and personal experience. Froude had a fixed idea that English politicians, especially Liberal politicians, wanted to get rid of the Colonies. Else why had they withdrawn British troops from Canada and New Zealand? He could not see, perhaps they did not all see themselves, that to give the Colonies complete freedom, and to insist upon their providing, except so far as the Navy was concerned, for their own defence, would strengthen, not weaken, the tie. In proof of his theory he produced some singular evidence, comprising one of the strangest stories that ever was told. He heard it, so he informs us, from Sir Arthur Helps, and reproduces it in his own words.
"A Government had gone out; Lord Palmerston was forming a new Ministry, and in a preliminary Council was arranging the composition of it. He had filled up the other places. He was at a loss for a Colonial Secretary. This name and that was suggested, and thrown aside. At last he said, 'I suppose I must take the thing myself. Come upstairs with me, Helps, when the Council is over. We will look at the maps, and you shall show me where these places are.'"
If Froude's memory of this anecdote be accurate, Helps must, for once, have been drawing upon his imagination. As Clerk of the Council, he had no more to do with forming Cabinets than with appointing bishops. Palmerston was never Colonial Secretary in his life; and among his faults as a Minister, which were positive rather than negative, ignorance of political geography was certainly not included. Many people, however, especially the Tariff Reform League, will consider that the passage which immediately succeeds proves Froude to have been in advance of his age. For he argues that trade follows the flag, because "our colonists take three times as much of our productions in proportion to their number as foreigners take." A tour through the Colonies for the purpose of conversing with their most influential statesmen had long been one of his cherished plans. Hitherto he had got no farther than the Cape, where, as we have seen, he became entangled in South African politics, and had to repeat his visit. Now he was bound for Australasia, and on the 6th of December, 1884, he left Tilbury Docks, with his son Ashley, in an Aberdeen packet of four thousand tons. His love of the sea, Elizabethan in its intensity, was heightened by his enjoyment of Greek literature, especially the Odyssey, which he considered ideal reading for a ship, and, as it surely is, on ship or on shore, an incomparable tale of adventure.
Before the end of the year Froude was at Cape Town, renewing his acquaintance with familiar scenes. Many of his former friends were dead, and his courteous enemy, now Sir John Molteno, had left Cape Town as well as public life. The Prime Minister was Mr. Upington, a clever lawyer, afterwards Sir Thomas Upington, and the chief topic was Sir Charles Warren's expedition to Bechuanaland, which happily did not end in war, as Upington apprehended that it would. Sir Hercules Robinson was Governor and High Commissioner, a man after Froude's heart, "too upright to belong to any party," and thoroughly appreciative of all that was best in the Boers. This time Froude's stay was a short one, and early in 1885 he was at Melbourne. Here the burning question was the German occupation of New Guinea, for which Colonial opinion held Gladstone's Government, and Lord Derby in particular, responsible. On the other hand, Lord Derby had suggested Australian Federation, which received a good deal of support, though it led to nothing at the time. On one point Froude seems always to have met with Sympathy. Abuse of Gladstone never failed to elicit a favourable response, and the news of Gordon's death was an opportunity not to be wasted. But when there came rumours of a possible war with Russia over the Afghan frontier, Froude took the side of Russia, or at all events of peace, and contended with his Tory companion, Lord Elphinstone, who was for war. In New Zealand he visited the venerable Sir George Grey, who had violated all precedent by entering local politics, and becoming Prime Minister, after the Duke of Buckingham had recalled him from the Governorship of the Colony. He was not equally successful in his second career, and Froude's unqualified praise of him was resented by many New Zealanders. That the Colonies would be true to the mother country if the mother country were true to them was the safe if somewhat vague conclusion at which the returning traveller arrived. He came home by America, and met with a more formidable antagonist than his old assailant Father Burke, in the shape of a terrific blizzard.
But hardships had no deterring effect upon Froude, and his love of travel, like his love of the classics, suffered no diminution while strength remained. He returned from the Antipodes early in 1885. Before 1886 was out he had started on a voyage to the West Indies, so that his survey of our Colonial possessions might be complete. Ardent imperialist as he was, Froude was not less fully alive than Mr. Goldwin Smith to the difficulties inherent in a policy of Imperial Federation. "All of us are united at present," he had written in Oceana,* "by the invisible bonds of relationship and of affection for our common country, for our common sovereign, and for our joint spiritual inheritance. These links are growing, and if let alone will continue to grow, and the free fibres will of themselves become a rope of steel. A federation contrived by politicians would snap at the first strain." Australian Federation, which Froude did not live to see, was no contrivance of politicians, but the result of spontaneous opinion generated in Australia, and ratified as a matter of course by Parliament at home.
— * P. 393. —
The West Indian Islands had an especial fascination for Froude on account of the great naval exploits of Rodney, Hood, and other British sailors. 'Kingsley's At Last had revived his interest in them; and though Kingsley had long been dead, his memory was fresh among all who knew him. The diary which Froude kept during this journey has been preserved, and I am enabled to make a few extracts from it. On the last day of 1886, while he was crossing the Bay of Biscay, he meditated upon the subject which occupied Cicero at an earlier period of his life. "Last day of the year. One more gone of the few which can now remain to me. Old age is not what I looked for. It is much pleasanter. Physically, except that I cannot run, or jump, or dance, I do not feel much difference, and I don't want to do those things. Spirits are better. Life itself has less worries with it, and seems prettier and truer to me now that I can look at it objectively, without hopes and anxieties on my own account. I have nothing to expect in this world in the way of good. It has given me all that it will or can. I am less liable to illusions. One knows by experience that nothing is so good or so bad as one has fancied, and that what is to be will be mainly what has been. So many of one's friends are dead! Yes, but one will soon die too. Each friend gone is the cutting a link which would have made death painful. It loses its terror as it draws nearer, especially when one thinks what it would be if one were not allowed to die." Tennyson has expressed in Tithonus the idea at which Froude glances, and from which he averts his gaze. Carlyle's senility was not enviable, and even that sturdy veteran Stratford Canning* told Gladstone that longevity was "not a blessing." Like Cephalus at the opening of Plato's Republic, Froude found that he could see more clearly when the mists of sentiment were dispersed.
While at sea Froude pursued his favourite musings on the worthlessness of all orators, from Demosthenes and Cicero to Burke and Fox, from Burke and Fox to Gladstone and Bright. The world was conveniently divided into talking men and acting men. Gladstone had never done anything. He had always talked.
"I wonder whether people will ever open their eyes about all this. The orators go in for virtue, freedom, etc., the cheap cant which will charm the constituencies. They are generous with what costs them nothing—Irish land, religious liberty, emancipation of niggers—sacrificing the dependencies to tickle the vanity of an English mob and catch the praises of the newspapers. If ever the tide turns, surely the first step will be to hang the great misleaders of the people—as the pirates used to be—along the House of Commons terrace by the river as a sign to mankind, and send the rest for ever back into silence and impotence."
— * Lord Stratford de Redcliffe. —