MR. FROUDE'S NEW BOOK.*

Mn. FROUDE'S winter trip to the West Indies has given the public another opportunity of enjoying one of his delightful

books of travel. The sunlike floods of rhetoric with which he illumined the great island of the Pacific and its smaller neighbours have now been turned upon the archipelago of the -Caribbean Sea. Those who love to bask in the rays of Mr.

Fronde's romances have by this time learned to know that they must be content with the pleasure of the moment, and that they must riot look to him for the solid comfort to be derived from real facts and statistics. Mr. Froude is far too great an

artist ever to mar his picture by a discordant line or tone. If the true fact or figure does.not harmonise with its surroundings, so much the worse for it. The readers of Oceana will remember

how Mr. Froude made "the broad Murray fall into the sea at no great distance [from Adelaide] to the westward," when, as a matter of fact, the sand-blocked river enters the sea sixty miles east of the city; how at Adelaide, too, he painted the harbour "full of ships, great steamers, great liners, coasting schooners, ships of all sorts," when, in truth, the port cannot be entered by large vessels at all, and the "great liners" have to lie many miles off; and how he put the city in a basin, when its founders placed it on the highest ground in the neighbourhood ; and accordingly will not regard Mr. Fronde's work as a reliable repository for sound information, geographical, political, or commercial, as to our West Indian Colonies. We feel confident, however, that Mr. Froude will not be annoyed when we thus warn our readers against regarding his work as a mere "barren handbook," for does he not say of such works,—" In them I found nothing but modern statistics pointing to dreary con- clusions, and in the place of any human interest long stories of Constitutions, suffrages, Representative Assemblies, power of elected members, and powers reserved to the Crown. Such things, important as they might be, did not touch my imagination P" Mr. Fronde goes on to say that to an Englishman the West Indies have a far higher interest. Are they not the scene on which such characters as the man.eating Caribs, Columbus and Cortez, the English Protestants, the French Huguenots, Drake and his seamen, the filibusters and the buccaneers, Rodney and De Grasse, acted their parts in the great drama of history ? When an author pats together a book of travels on such a theory as this, it would be out of place to hunt him down, handbook in hand, whenever he starts a particularly exciting wild-goose chase over some mistaken point of statistical information. After all, would he not reply to us that our books of reference are barren things, that our statistics point to dreary conclusions, and that our long stories of Constitutions and rights of the Crown, &c., are without human interest ? Thus, then, though Mr. Froude does, in fact, give us a great deal of what, if it were found elsewhere, we should be obliged to call statistical information as to the West Indies, we shall prefer to deal, for the most

part, with his rhetoric and description. Here, at least, we shall be on safe ground, and not be likely to add to that volume, referred to by the missionary who, on board ship, a propos of nothing, suddenly addressed the following remark to Mr.

Froude,—" If all the attacks upon your writings which I have seen were collected together, they would make an interesting volume."

In Mr. Froude's work, two strains of music, as it were, are constantly being interwoven. One heroic, one melancholy. One inspired by the patriotic glories of England in the past ; the other, by the dread that those glories and the spirit that produced them have departed. The waters of the Caribbean.Sea, every island from Trinidad to Jamaica, tell the naval prowess of England, and how the thunders of Rodney's cannon shattered the French fleet and saved the Empire. To a man imbued with the political pessimism of Mr. Fronde, the commercial depres- sion that has of late affected the West Indies makes them also tell that the spirit of England, for the time at least, is not equal to her high destiny. It would not be doing justice to Mr. Fronde's work if we did not quote an example of both i strains.

This is Mr. Fronde's spirited description of Rodney's great victory over the French fleet off Dominica, some reference to which is to be found on almost every page :—

"With clear daylight the signal to engage was flying from the masthead of the 'Formidable,' Rodney's ship. At seven in the morning, April 12, 1782, the whole fleet bore down obliquely on the French line, cutting it directly in two. Rodney led in person. Having • The English in the West Indies; or, the Bow of Ulysses. By James Anthony Fronde. London ; Longmans, Green, and Co. 1888.

passed through and broken up their order he tacked again, etill keeping the wind. The French, thrown into confusion, were unable to reform, and the battle resolved itself into a number of separate engagements in which the English had the choice of position. Rodney in passing through the enemy's lines the first time had exchanged broadsides with the • Glorieux,' a seventy-four, at close range. He had shot away her masts and bowsprit, and left her a bare hull ; her flag, however, still flying, being nailed to a splintered spar. So he left her unable at least to stir ; and after he had gone about came himself yardarm to yardarm with the superb Ville de Paris,' the pride of France, the largest ship in the then world, where De Graeae commanded in person. All day long the cannon roared. Rodney had on board a favourite bantam cook, which stood perched upon the poop of the Formidable' through the whole aotion, its shrill voice heard crowing through the thunder of the broadsides. One by one the French ships struck their flags or fought on till they foundered and went down. The carnage on board them was terrible, crowded as they were with the troops for Jamaica. Fourteen thou- sand were reckoned to have been killed, besides the prisoners. The Ville de Paris' surrendered last, fighting desperately after hope was gone till her masts were so shattered that they could not bear a sail, and her decks above and below were littered over with mangled limbs. De Grasse gave up his sword to Rodney on the Formidable's ' quarter-deck. The gallant Glorienx,' unable to fly, and seeing the battle lost, hauled down her flag, but not till the undisabled remnants of her crew were too few to throw the dead into the sea. Other ships took fire and blew up. Half the French fleet were either taken or sunk ; the rest crawled away for the time, most of them to be picked up afterwards like crippled birds. So on that memorable day was the English Empire saved. Peace followed, but it was 'peace with honour.' The American colonies were lost ; but England kept her West Indies ; her flag still floated over Gibraltar ; the hostile strength of Europe all combined had failed to twist Britannia's ocean sceptre from her : she sat down maimed and bleeding, but the wreath had not been torn from her brow, she was still sovereign of the seas."

Magnificent for vividness of verbal painting and for clear- toned rhetoric as are many of Mr. Fronde's historical pictures, few of them can compare with this description, where the period seems to catch the majestic roll of the Atlantic waves on which the Navies of France and England rode.

Mr. Fronde's melancholy reflections are always ushered in by the metaphor of the unstrung bow of Ulysses. Here is one of these laments from the introduction :—

"The bow of Ulysses is unstrung. The worms have not eaten into the horn or the moths injured the string, but the owner of the house is away and the suitors of Penelope Britannia consume her substance, rivals one of another, each caring only for himself, but with a COMM= heart in evil. They cannot string the bow. Only the true lord and master can string it, and in due time he comes, and the cord is stretched once more upon the notch, singing to the touch of the finger with the sharp note of the swallow ; and the arrows fly to their mark in the breasts of the pretenders, while Pallas Athena looks on approving from her coign of vantage."

Though we have little sympathy with the feeling of despair thus melodiously expressed, we cannot help acknowledging that it is difficult to look at England as we see her, and not fear that there may be some truth in the picture. Yet, after all, is not this feeling of despondency, though natural, one which we have no right to hold P We make comparison with ourselves in past times, or with other nations in the present, and ask 'Would they have acted thus?' and we find our present divided counsels and our hesitancy seem despicable beside their achievement. Bat is the comparison fair ? Are we not comparing a nation in the crisis of national disease with nations that have succeeded in living through and overcoming the malady? We compare our attitude during the height of the Home-rule agitation with that of the Northern States in their triumph over Secession. Instead, ought we not to compare ourselves, as we are now, to the Northern States during their period of darkness ? Whoever has read General Grant's memoirs will remember how clearly he shows that a very great part—perhaps the greater part—of the population of the North was always weak, always wanting to give in to the rebellion, always in that condition of political flabbiness which Mr. Froude complains of in the Englishmen of to-day; and how, but for Grant's own hard pounding and Lincoln's heroic courage in spite of every discouragement, the cause of the Union would have been lost. During the crisis, as always, the majority of men seemed to lose heart and hope. It was only a small but indomitable minority who compelled the greater number by sheer force of character to face the enemy and save their country. We do not believe that in our national peril the result will be different. And then, when the crisis is over, the general body of citizens will take heart again, and will fancy that they never "despaired of the republic." We must not leave Mr. Fronde's book without saying some- thing as to his actual travels. Leaving England covered with snow on December 30th, 1886, he reached Barbados, when he found himself in a summer climate. Of Barbados and its well-tilled fields he gives us an extremely pleasant

picture. The island, though suffering, like all the others he visited, from the low price of sugar, seems fairly prosperous. The Negroes in Barbados are not the owners of the soil, which still belongs to large proprietors, and work for wages. In his own picturesque way, Mr. Fronde manages to impress most strongly on his readers the chief feature of Bar- bados, when compared with the other West Indian Colonies, —its completely English character. The other islands were conquests from European Powers, Barbados was English from the beginning. If Mr. Fronde had started on his journey in a less pessimistic mood, the fact that the only really English Colony was the only flourishing national possession seen by him during his voyage, might perhaps have given him some hopeful reflections. As it is, however, he only notices that Barbados is not in the condition of decay he deplores in so many other places. If, however, the reader is cheered by a more or less pleasant account of Barbados, he is soon brought to the proper level of despondency by the account of Dominica, where, if we are to believe the writer, the whites are gradually dwindling to extinction, and the Negroes relapsing into barbarism. In Jamaica, according to Mr. Fronde, things are getting as bad, though on a grander scale. The sugar-estates are worthless ; the Negroes do not work, partly from laziness, and partly because the whites, ruined over their sugar-plantations, have not the heart to attempt to grow any crops that will pay. The 'cute Yankee passes by and notices " there's dollars in those islands ;" but the West Indian whites do not know how to set about extracting them from the soil, and fold their hands while wealth is lying at the very doors. Such are the wails of misery that rise through Mr. Fronde's pages. Occasionally, however, a more piercing shriek is heard, when the author descants on the wickedness of the Colonial Office in shifting and chopping and changing its policy with regard to the islands,—sometimes giving them elective Constitutions, sometimes taking these Constitutions away, but never settling on anything definite. Equally shrill is Mr. Fronde's denunciation of the Home Government for not allowing the Colonies to accept a treaty of commerce offered them by the United States. Into the exact merits of both these complaints it is impossible to go on the evidence given us in the book, for Mr. Froude, true to his principle, only gives the facts that strike his imagination, not the more prosaic circumstances which would modify, and so blur his vivid picture. That Mr. Fronde is probably right in his main notion, that the more the West Indies are governed like the East Indies, and the less political power is given to the Negroes, the better for all concerned, we see no reason to doubt. The results of Negro rule in Hayti—devil-worship, cannibalism, and the practice of every form of abominable superstition— are such as absolutely to prohibit the notion of self-government, with universal suffrage, in Colonies where the blacks are to the whites as twenty to one. It may be remembered here that Mr. Fronde (unless we misunderstand him) appears to regret the abolition of slavery. Yet, with a fine disregard for his own theory, he notices the complete success of the recent emancipation in Cuba, and incidentally remarks that wage-paid Negro labour is cheaper and better than slave-labour. Into this question, as into many others, we cannot follow Mr. Froude. We must not, however, leave his book without mentioning how in. teresting is his account of his short glance at Hayti and its capital—the Paris of the gutter— and of his stay in Cuba. Any one who wishes to see a living picture of Spain's last great Colony, cannot do better that turn to this account. With so much of criticism, we must leave Mr. Froude's book. If it is to be summed up in a sentence, we should say that, random, sketchy, prejudiced, reckless in relation to fact, and full of con- tradictions as it is, it nevertheless cannot be condemned as a book, since it has in so high a degree the inestimable gift of being thoroughly readable, since the style is so eloquent and so living, and since the effect on the reader cannot but be to awaken his interest on a subject of such vast importance as the rule of the English among the Negroes of the West Indies.