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.