"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.