It made him, he said, a Home Ruler because it exposed the iniquities of the English Government.

This was not Froude's principal object, but the testimony to his truthfulness is all the more striking on that account.

Gladstone, who quoted from the English in Ireland when he introduced his Land Purchase Bill in 1886, paid a just tribute to the "truth and honour" of the writer.
If it be once granted that the Irish are a subject race, that the Catholic faith is a degrading superstition, and that Ireland is only saved from ruin by her English or Scottish settlers, Froude's book deserves little but praise.

Although he did not study for it as he studied for his History of England he read and copied a large number of State Papers, with a great mass of official correspondence.
Freeman would have been appalled at the idea of such research as Froude made in Dublin, and at the Record Office in London.

But the scope of his book, and the thesis he was to develop, had formed themselves in his mind before he began.