THE STATE OF KERRY

It has been stated that it is only within the last forty years that the bulk of the people of Ireland, long outside the pale of the ballot-box, have actively entered political life. This is quite true.

The whole of the Home Rule troubles followed the presentation of practically universal suffrage to the half-educated and over-enthusiastic Irish, who are easily led away, apt to believe mob-orators, and, by inherited instinct, to go against the Government.

What the effect of universal suffrage in India would be it is not my business to estimate. Still, the analogy of what the ballot-paper provided in Ireland, if applied to the teeming population of our Oriental Empire, suggests a pandemonium to which the horrors of the Mutiny are but a mere scream of agony.

The ballot transformed Ireland; or rather, it permitted the worst passions of the most ignorant to be played upon by interested adventurers, when the political power of Ireland had passed for ever out of the hands of the restraining classes. Democracy spelt anarchy, and the word patriotism was degraded in a way that had no parallel since the French Revolution.

Members were returned for Irish constituencies who had been convicts; others came who richly deserved imprisonment for life. They instigated murders, and clamoured because the murderers were not regarded as heroes; or if they were hung, canonised them as martyrs. They attempted to prostitute the law to their own base standard of political morality. They assiduously laboured to render life valueless in Ireland and property worthless, whilst no deed was too cowardly, no atrocity too barbarous, for them to praise. They alone in modern times warred against women and children. Animals were the dumb victims of the inhuman ferocity they in no way tried to check, and they effectively taught the receptive Irish millions that a British Government could be coerced into giving what was demanded provided a sufficient number of crimes created a holocaust large enough to intimidate the weak-kneed at St. Stephen's.

But Mr. Parnell and the Land League would all have been promptly reduced to the pitiful unimportance from which they had so noisily emerged if it had not been for Mr. Gladstone.

Long before this the Irish political agitator had set himself to embitter the relations existing between landlord and tenant. An Englishman goes into Parliament for various motives; an Irishman for his living. If he did not outshout his neighbour, if he were not implicitly obedient to Mr. Parnell, if he did not arouse the worst passions of the worst people in his constituency, he was promptly dismissed.

To do them justice, the Irish members gave such an exhibition of blackguardism as has no parallel on earth, though it earned but the mildest rebuke from their obsequious ally, Mr. Gladstone.

In 1869, for example, before this balloting away of all that was creditable to Ireland, the relations between landlord and tenant were of the most kindly nature. The leading landlords of Kerry generally represented the county in Parliament with uniform decency and occasional brilliance, while larger sums were borrowed and expended by the landlords under the Land Improvement Act than were spent in the same way in any other county. I can prove that the principal landowner in Kerry—Lord Kenmare—expended a greater sum in ten years on his estates than he received out of them, though I cannot say he ever found out for himself that it was better to give than to receive.

Here is an instance from my own experience.

I purchased from the Government in 1879 an estate, the rental of which was £517, 2s. 4d.; it was considered so cheaply let that the majority of the tenants offered twenty-seven years' purchase for their farms. I borrowed from the Government and expended on drainage £1120, 14s. 11d. Then the Commissioners under the Land Act reduced the rental to £495, 10s. 6d., and the Government which sold me the estate continued to compel me to pay interest on the amount borrowed, although by its own legislation I was deprived of any advantage resulting from the outlay.

The rental of Kerry in 1870 was considerably less than it had been forty years previously, and higher prices were paid for the fee-simple of land than were offered in any other part of Ireland. But Mr. Gladstone's 'remedial manoeuvres' changed the country and the people.

Demoralising bribes to the Irish nation frittered away the proceeds of the plunder of the Irish Church. A notable instance was a million under the Arrears Act, the principle of which was that no honest tenant who had paid his rent could derive any benefit from it, but that any drunkard or squanderer who had not paid his rent might have it paid for him by the Government on swearing that he was unable to pay.

A tenant, whose yearly rent was £48, had one year's rent paid by Government and another year's rent given up by his landlord, on his swearing that the selling value of his farm was nil; ten weeks afterwards he served me with a notice, as required by the statute, that he had sold the interest of the farm for £670.

Again, there was a tenant who swore that he had expended £513, 14s. 6d. in permanent improvements, and that after this expenditure the fair letting value of the farm was only £17, though the original rent was £26, 4s.

How could I blame an ignorant peasantry for making false statements, when laws were framed by the leaders of public opinion in England which released the Irish tenants from every moral obligation, and made their assumed responsibilities and agreements a dead letter; while orators, living on the wages of patriotism, were allowed to preach sedition and plunder to an excitable people? The result was that the work of demoralisation made rapid progress, perjury became a joke, assassination was merely 'removal,' and men who had been brutally murdered were said to have met with an accident.

I have already shown how apt a prophet Mr. Gladstone was in his forecast in the House of Commons in 1870, and one more quotation adds testimony to his inspiration—though from what direction it came I will not linger to inquire:—

'Compulsory valuation and fixity of tenure would bring about total demoralisation and a Saturnalia of crime.'

Exactly.

Certainly the law did not prevent them increasing the rent; but, unfortunately for the reasoning of Mr. Laing, and his taking for granted imaginary 'confiscations,' figures most decidedly prove that the landlords did not use any such power. The rentals have steadily decreased while the landlords were borrowing and expending nearly half a million in my own county.

This fact is conclusively demonstrated by the Government returns.

As to the National League—with all its paraphernalia of boycotting, shooting from behind a hedge, merciless beating, shooting in the legs, and other similar variations of Irish Home Rule, on which I shall dwell in a later chapter—being only a protector of the weak tenant against the hard landlord, I think one fact will prove more forcibly than any argument the fallacy of such an assertion.

There were two estates in Kerry let at a much lower rate than any others in the county—those of Lord Cork and Colonel Oliver.

Colonel Oliver's agent was the only one fired at in Kerry in 1886, and Lord Cork's agent was the only one obliged to employ over two hundred police to protect him in endeavouring to recover in 1887 rent which was due in 1884. This rent was due on land let at considerably under the Poor Law valuation, and the rents were only half what was paid in 1860.

I should like to retort on Mr. Laing that, while the evidence before the Land Commissioner proved the rental of Ireland was diminishing, that of the country where his own property lay increased to an unusual degree. I do not say the landlords confiscated the tenants' improvements, possibly they made none. But figures are hard facts, and they prove three things:—

First, that Kerry landlords spent £453,539 on improvements. Secondly, that the rental of Kerry was lower in 1880 than in 1840. Thirdly, that the rental of Orkney increased 194 per cent. during that time.

On the south-west coast of Kerry lie the Blasquets, a group of islands the property of Lord Cork, one of them inhabited by some twenty-five families. The old rental was £80, which was regularly paid. This was reduced by Lord Cork to £40, the Government valuation being £60. Now this island reared about forty milch cows, besides young cattle and sheep, and at the period when might meant right in Ireland the inhabitants, having some surplus stock, took possession of another island to feed them on.

This island was let to another man, but he was not able to resist the tenants any more than the mouse nibbling a piece of cheese is able to fight a cat.

This is a remarkable case, and proves that poverty and the cry of starvation are not always the result of rents and taxes, as the Irish patriots and their English separatist allies so frequently assert.

I am going to quote a colloquy overheard at a Kerry fair to show how deeply the teaching of Messrs. Parnell, Gladstone, Dillon, Morley, Davitt, Biggar, and Company has taken root in the Irish mind.

Jim from Castleisland meeting Mick from Glenbeigh, asks:—

'Well, Mick, an' how are ye getting on?'

'Illigant, glory be to the Saints.'

'How's that, Mick? Sure, prices is low.'

'True for you, Jim, prices is low; but what we has we has, for we pays nobody.'

And to that I will add another observation.

Somebody asked me:—

'If Ireland were to get Home Rule, what would become of the agitator?'

I replied:—

'He would be called a reformer, unless it paid him better to clamour for a fresh Union. He'd sell all his patriotism for five shillings, and his loyalty could be bought by a few glasses of whisky.'

And that's the whole truth of the matter.

A GLANCE AT MY STEWARDSHIP

Davitt called the generation after O'Connell's 'a soulless age of pitiable cowardice.'

I should call the generation that was active in the early eighties 'a cowardly age of pitiless brutality.'

Times had begun to mend in Ireland from 1850, and had continued to do so until the ballot made the country a prey to self-seeking political agitators.

Mr. Gladstone considered that if you gave a scoundrel a vote it made him into a philanthropist, whereas events proved it made him an eager accessory of murder, outrage, and every other crime.

Yet this happened after Fenianism had practically died out in the early seventies.

I myself heard Mr. Gladstone say that landlords had been weighed in the balance and had not been found wanting, for the bad ones were exceptional.

None the less were they and their representatives delivered over to their natural opponents, who were egged on by the Land League and by its tacit or active supporters in the House of Commons.

Emphatically I repeat the assertion that neither Mr. Parnell nor the Land League would have been formidable without the active help of Mr. Gladstone.

This was no more foreseen by the landlords when the ballot was introduced any more than we anticipated the way in which we were to be plundered. Many considered that the confiscation of the Irish Church, which had been established since the reign of Elizabeth, was an inroad into the rights of property very likely to be followed up by further aggressions, but we never looked for such a wholesale violation as ensued.

By the Act of 1870 no tenant could be turned out without being paid a sum averaging a fourth of the fee-simple in addition to being paid for his improvements, and there the most observant of us thought the worst had been reached.

When the Act of 1881 was passed, I met Lord Spencer, one of the authors of it, and said to him:—

'This Act will have as much effect in settling Ireland as throwing a cup of dirty water into the Thames would have in creating a flood.'

My words were soon proved right, for the tenants, having obtained half the landlord's property by it, thought that by well working their voting and shooting powers they would get the remainder.

I have been getting away from my own experiences to give my own convictions. When you have meditated for twenty years amid the ruins of what you had been building up all your life long and know that it is due to Irish outrage and English misrule, there is a temptation to speak plainly on breaking silence.

On July 8, 1880, I gave evidence before the Royal Commission on Agriculture, being mainly examined by the president, the Duke of Richmond and Gordon, others on the board being Lord Carlingford, Mr. Stansfeld, afterwards Lord, Mr. Joseph Cowen, and Mr. Mitchell Henry.

Here are some of my statements on a then experience of thirty-one years:—

'The expenditure by landlords on farm buildings is as great in Ireland as in Scotland.'

'In the exceptional state of things I strongly disapprove of tenant-right in Ireland, which, as Lord Palmerston said, is landlord wrong.'

'Small holdings are a very bad thing in Ireland where they are not mixed with large holdings.'

'The distress in Kerry is considerable, but has been considerably exaggerated.'

'Every tenant in Ireland has six months to redeem after he is evicted.'

'I have never known a man leave a farm unless compelled.'

'I contradict the statement that tenants make improvements which tend to increase the letting value of the land.'

'You pay four times as much for spade tillage as for ploughing by horse.'

'Bad farming in Ireland is due to want of education and to the enhanced subdivision of the land. When the farmer gets higher up the social scale he will have more sense than to make beggars of his children by subdivision.'

'Almost more land has been sold in Kerry than in any county in Ireland.'

Three months later, in my evidence before the Irish Land Act Commission, in answer to the Chairman, I stated that in my opinion it was simply impossible to arbitrate on rent. I had two tenants of my own whose yearly rent was £20 and whose valuation was £20. One of them in 1880 sold £135 worth of pigs and butter, and the other man's children were assisted in charity from my house, though both had equal means of success.

I also pointed out that there were then 300,000 occupiers of land in Ireland, whose holdings were under £8 Poor Law valuation, and these occupiers when their potatoes failed had nothing but relief works, starvation, or emigration. To give them their whole rent would not meet the difficulty.

I submitted a scheme of purchase, in which Baron Dowse was greatly interested, and I suggested that all holdings under £4 a year should be ejected at Petty Sessions, because it was a great hardship for the tenant of such a holding to have £2, 10s. costs put upon him.

I ended with:—

'There is a case in this county in connection with which there is likely to be very considerable disturbance. A man had a farm put up for sale and a Nationalist bought it at a very low figure, on the understanding that he was to keep it for the man's family; but as soon as he got it he turned Conservative and kept it.'

BARON DOWSE—'Turned what?'
MYSELF—'Conservative.'
BARON DOWSE—'Rogue, I would say. You would not say that Conservatives are rogues?'

As the distress was alluded to above, I may lighten the recent seriousness of my observations by an anecdote on the topic.

In 1880 the Duchess of Marlborough organised a fund for supplying the people with meal. The Dublin Mansion House did the same, but their meal was of a coarser description.

A Blasquet Islander was asked how he was getting on, and made answer:—

'Illigant, glory be to the Saints. We're eating the Duchess, and feeding two pigs on the Mansion House.'

This recalls the story of the Englishman who inquired of a Kerry man which measure of English legislation had proved most beneficial for Ireland.

'The Famine (of 1879) was the best, beyond a shadow of doubt,' was the reply, 'for I fattened and sold ninety fine turkeys on the strength of it.'

In 1880 some Kerry men did a very good stroke of business. They sent a cargo of potatoes from Killorglin to Scotland and brought them back as imported Champion seed, selling them for six times the original price.

About this period Mr. Leeson-Marshall, who had been away from Kerry and coming back found some cottages near Milltown still only half built, observed:—

'Good God, aren't those houses finished yet?'

'Well, sor,' was the reply, 'the contract's finished but the houses aren't.'

And it has been my life-long experience that ninety-five per cent, of all the penalties in contracts are worthless, as the contractors themselves are only too well aware.

Out of Mr. Finlay Dun's book, from which I have previously quoted, I condense the following from the chapter he devoted to the estates for which I was agent.

He observes that in 1881 my firm had the supervision of eighty-eight estates, upwards of three thousand farming tenants, and annually collected rents to the value of a quarter of a million sterling. From the particulars I furnished him he deduces:—

'So recently as the end of November the Lady Day rents had been well paid up; old arrears had been reduced; on two estates in the Court of Chancery £6000 had been collected with only a few shillings in default. Dairy farmers prospering had been particularly well able to pay rents and other claims. More recent rent collections, unfortunately, were not so satisfactory. Tenants generally had earned the money, but had not been allowed to pay it over.

'Many of the low-rented estates were badly farmed and the tenantry in low water. On the higher rented, the struggle for existence had brought out extra industry and energy and led to fair success.'

The following provided an apt illustration:—

'The larger proprietors, as a rule, were most helpful and liberal to their tenants. Where improvements were not effected or initiated by the landlords, they were seldom done at all. There had often been considerable difficulty in overcoming the prejudice and "the rest-and-be-thankful" spirit both of landlords and tenants.

'On Sir George Colthurst's Ballyvourney estate, twenty miles east of Killarney, under Mr. Hussey's auspices about £30,000 had been expended in draining, building, and roadmaking. The economic value of many holdings had been doubled, although the rents had only been increased five per cent., and subsequently the Commissioners fixed the rents at 25 per cent. less than they had been fifty years earlier.

'The extending village of Mill Street had been in great measure reconstructed by his exertions.

'The Land League having enforced non-payment of rent, the obligation to meet other debts was weakened. Although there was more money than usual in the hands of the farming community, shopkeepers were not so willingly and promptly paid as formerly. Want of security checked the improved business which should have set in after a good harvest. The Land League agitation generally originated with the publicans, small shopkeepers, and bankrupt farmers, rather than with the actual land occupiers. For peace and protection, many pay their subscription to the League and allow their names to be enrolled. The intimidation and 'boycotting,' which was so widely had recourse to, rendered it dangerous for either farmers or tradesmen to make a stand against the mob. With Sam Weller it was regarded expedient to shout with the biggest crowd.'

In his next chapter is a tribute to Lord Kenmare, 'a kind and considerate landlord, united to his people by strong ties of race and creed, residing for a great part of the year on his estates, ready with purse and influence to advance the interests of his neighbourhood. On his mansion and on the town of Killarney, since his accession to the property in 1871, he has spent £100,000. At his own expense he has erected a town hall, and improved and beautified Killarney. Within the last twenty years £10,000 of arrears have been written off. From last year's rents ten to twenty per cent, was deducted. During the last few years of distress, £15,000 has been borrowed for draining and other improvements; regular work has thus been found for the labourer; on such outlay in many instances no percentage has been charged. Since 1870, three hundred labourers have been comfortably housed and provided with gardens or allotments varying from one to three pounds annually.'

I could not myself so tersely put the situation to-day as by quoting this contemporary narrative, the facts for which I supplied.

Once more let me draw upon Mr. Finlay Dun. 'Unmindful of all this consistent liberality, ungrateful for the great efforts to improve his poorer neighbours, popular prejudice has been roused against Lord Kenmare; it has been impossible to collect rents; threatening letters have been sent to him. Mortified with the apparent fruitlessness of his humane endeavours he has been compelled to leave Killarney House.

This, however, is erroneous. I only took a house for my family in London for the winter, and was backwards and forwards between Kerry and the metropolis.

Against all this let me set another quotation. In New York Tablet for 1880, a letter from Daniel O'Shea, who stated that for a large number of years he was a resident in Killarney.

'Among the most prominent tyrants was Lord Kenmare, who has so recently surpassed himself and his antecedents in despotism. He is a lineal descendant of the original land thief, Valentine Brown, who was a special pet of 'the Virgin Queen' Bess, and strange to relate, this descendant of that Brown is a much-favoured pet of John Brown's Queen. Let me explain that he lives with the Queen in London where he holds the position of chamberlain (sic) ... At Aghadoe House now resides that ruthless Sam Hussey. Allow me to give you an outline of this heartless fellow's antecedents. This Hussey is of English origin and was formerly a cattle-dealer, and practised usury as far back as 1845. If all Ireland were to be searched for a similar despot he would not be found. He is a regular anti-Christ and Orangeman at heart, and, in fact, he acts as agent for all the bankrupt landlords in Kerry. An English-Irish landlord is an alien in heart, a despot by instinct, an absentee by inclination; and all the foul confederacy of landlordism in Kerry is always in direct opposition to the cause of Ireland.'

After all, scurrilous denunciation never affected me. His life by Sir Wemyss Reid reveals how Mr. W.E. Forster flinched under the vituperation levelled at his head. But he was not an Irishman, least of all a Kerry man, and so he never felt the fun of the fray, the grim earnest of the fight which made me set my teeth and give as good as I received. Indeed, I'll take my oath no man had the better of me, either in bandying words or yet in acts, so long as they were open and above-board, but it has always been the way of sedition and conspiracy to hit below the belt.

MURDER, OUTRAGE AND CRIME

Once launched upon memories of those horrible perpetrations by so-called Christians, which disgraced alike my native country and all Christendom (because the criminals nominally worshipped the same God, and professed reverence to Him), I could enumerate instances until I had filled a volume.

You know how the Ghost told Hamlet that he could a tale unfold, whose lightest word would harrow up his soul. Why, I could tell five score, and still not have exhausted the roll of crime.

As my experience is mainly connected with Kerry, it is characteristically Irish for me to start with an example from County Cork. The outrage was on the Rathcole estate of Sir George Colthurst. The rental was £1500, and the landlord had expended £10,000 on improvements, so that it was not to be wondered that the labourers should meet to celebrate their employer's marriage.

Nor to any one knowing Ireland was it surprising that the Land League should have despatched one of their well-armed bands to fire on them for so doing.

This was apparently a challenge to Kerry not to be outdone in barbarity by Cork, her neighbour and rival.

Kerry was quite equal to current demands on her inhumanity.

The next night a small Protestant farmer near Tralee found his best cow tortured and killed because he had sold milk to the police.

On the same night a farmer's house was sacked because he had bought some 'boycotted' hay.

Still on the same night, at Millstreet, another Land League gang attacked a house, one of the Land League police being killed, and one of the Crown police wounded.

In fact, all law save Land League law was for a time at an end in Munster.

At one Kerry Assize, a criminal caught by four policemen in the very act of breaking into a house, was acquitted, and at the Cork Assize the Crown Prosecutor, after half a dozen acquittals, announced he would not continue the farce of putting criminals on their trial.

I mentioned boycotting just now, but I am tempted to pause, because a new generation that knows not Parnellism, nor the extent of crime in that unhappy period, may not be aware of the origin of the term.

Baron Dowse said in charging the Grand Jury of the Connaught Western Assize, that this case had 'excited the wonder and amazement of a great part of the United Kingdom and the sorrow of a considerable portion of Ireland.' Very soon the name of Boycott was given to the approved method of actively sending a man to Coventry, or threatening his life and property as well as refusing to permit him to be supplied with even the bare necessities of existence.

Baron Dowse, a man who had no fear of unmanly criminals, justly styled this a reign of terror.

Kerry is divided into six Poor Law Unions, three of them—Kenmare, Cahirciveen and Dingle—are very poor districts; but there was practically not an outrage in them. Killarney, Tralee and Listowel are rich by comparison, Tralee being the richest of the three, and Castleisland the wealthiest portion of the district. There were nearly as many outrages there as in the whole of the rest of the country, which shows that poverty was not the cause.

I was in and out of Castleisland, but though I had a sheaf of threatening letters, I never met with any insults or received a threat to my face.

Only once did I overhear any hostile mutterings. This was when I was driving out of Tralee, and my coachman stopped to give a message in the dusk at a house on the outskirts of the town.

Suddenly two or three men came up, and one said:—

'Now's the time to settle old Hussey.'

They did not. In fact they scattered with a rapidity which proved they had not imbibed enough whisky to affect their legs or give them courage.

This will show that my business—to collect what was due to the landlords I represented—was not always agreeable work or always easy. But my duty was to get in rents, and so I got them, whenever I could.

The tenants did not all pay direct, for many were far too frightened. Quite a number, even of the Roman Catholics, used to send the money through the Protestant clergy.

How they settled this in the confessional I do not know, possibly it was a trifle they did not consider worth troubling the priest with.

Three tenants on Lord Kenmare's estate came into my office on one occasion, and said they would like to pay their rent, but were afraid of the Land League.

I treated their fears as arrant nonsense, but told them to come and argue it out with me in my own room.

So soon as they could not be seen by any one they paid up.

Within a few days an armed party went to their houses and shot the three in their legs.

One man's life was despaired of for some time, but finally they all recovered.

This outrage was a rather late one, because the Land League latterly decided to shoot objectionable characters only in the legs, because though a fuss was made at the time, if a man was killed it was soon forgotten afterwards, whereas a lame man was a lifelong testimony to their power.

Judge Barry very truly said that a thatched cabin on a mountain-side was not much of a place of defence, and if the tenant was supposed to have paid his rent, he would be told to run out with probably three men standing at the door to shoot him. That was terrorism as inculcated by the so-called friends of Ireland.

Mr. Forster in his plucky speech to the crowd at Tullamore, said:—

'I went when I was at Tulla to the workhouse, and there saw a poor fellow lying in bed, the doctors around him, with a blue light over his face that made me feel that the doctors were not right, when they told me he might get over it. I felt sure that he must die, and I see this morning that he has died. But why did that man die? He was a poor lone farmer. I believe he had paid his rent—I believe he had committed that crime. He thought it his duty to pay. Fifteen or sixteen men broke into his house in the middle of the night, pulled him out of his bed and told him they would punish him. He himself, lying in his death agony as it were, told me the story. He said, "My wife went down on her knees and said, 'Here are five helpless children, will you kill their father?'" They took him out, they discharged a gun filled with shot into his leg, so closely that they shattered his leg.'

Now there were dozens of instances of that kind of thing in Kerry.

'Shun him in the street, in the shop, in the marketplace, even in the place of worship, as if he were a leper of old.'

His words were implicitly obeyed, and outrage followed mere boycotting till the rapid succession of crimes prevented each one having its full effect in horrifying civilised Europe.

A very bad case occurred in Millstreet.

Jeremiah Haggerty was a large farmer and shopkeeper. There was no objection to him, except that he declined to join the Land League, for which his shop was boycotted, which he told me meant the loss of a thousand a year to him, but the League failed to boycott his farm, because he was too good an employer.

He was fired at coming into Millstreet, and the outrage had been so openly planned, that it was talked of on the preceding evening in every whisky store.

On another occasion he was leaving Millstreet station, about a mile from the town, and when about twenty yards from the station he was fired at and forty grains of shot lodged in the back of his head, neck, and body. As it was twilight, a railway porter obligingly held up his lantern to give the miscreants a better view of their victim.

He was a man of most honourable and upright character, who had worked his way up, and he has now regained his popularity. He started as a clerk in quite a small way, and must now be worth a very large sum of money. I was instrumental in getting him made a magistrate, and I have the greatest respect for him.

I regard this as a decidedly serious example, because of the popularity of the victim, and also because he had offended no one by word or deed. Still, there were, of course, many instances which were even more outrageous.

A subscription was made up for the families of the two murderers, to which contributions were made by the leading shopkeepers of several neighbouring towns. For several years afterwards, Mrs. Brown could not get a man to dig her potatoes, nor a woman to milk her cows, although she had tendered no evidence at the trial, and it was clearly proved that Brown had given no cause of offence.

But, as a Land Leaguer said to me, it was suspected that he might be in a position to do so.

Red Indians, or any other barbarians you can think of, would not have been guilty of wreaking vengeance on the widow of an innocent murdered man, nor of endowing the wives of his assassins.

Here is another murder story.

A caretaker on an evicted farm on the property of Lord Cork, near Kanturk, was murdered for taking charge of it.

The evicted tenant had owed eleven years' rent.

Lord Cork had agreed to accept one year's rent in full acquittal, and so good a landlord was he, that the neighbours of the debtor offered to make up the amount to that sum.

The tenant firmly declined to pay, because he said another year would bring him within the statute of limitations.

So then he had to be evicted.

Two men were clearly identified as having perpetrated the unprovoked crime of assassinating the temporary occupant of the property, and were arrested.

The second man, though less guilty, was duly tried before a challenged jury, and not only sentenced but hanged.

He was the organiser of outrages for Cork, and his brother held the similar delectable office for Kerry. A good deal of the impunity with which crime was committed was due to the change in the jury laws, by which so low a class of man was summoned into the box, that criminals began to consider conviction impossible. To my mind it was quite worth the consideration of the Cabinet of the time, whether trial by jury ought not to be abolished in Ireland—indeed, even to-day, I can see few reasons for its retention and many for its abolition.

Anyhow in the bad times I am now dealing with, to send persons for trial before a jury was but to advertise the weakness of the law.

Two men at Tralee were suspected of having paid their rent to me, and in spite of their assurances that they were quite innocent and had not paid a farthing for two years, it was necessary for the police to escort them after nightfall to their homes about four miles away, and to advise them not to venture into the town for a long while after.

A similar fate befell two girls named Murphy merely because they were suspected of speaking to a policeman.

A man named Finlay was boycotted and then shot dead, and the neighbours jeered and laughed at his wife, when in her agony she was wringing her hands in grief.

The poor woman went into the street and knelt down crying:—

'The curse of God rest upon Father —— for being the cause of my husband's murder.'

The priest had denounced him from the altar on the previous Sunday.

'Carding' has always been a favourite Irish form of physically insinuating to a man that he is not exactly popular. It consists of a wooden board with nails in it being drawn down the naked flesh of a man's face and body. This foul torture was often heard of, and it has been whispered that women and even girls have been the victims of this atrocity.

The merciful man is proverbially merciful to his beast, and those who showed mercy to neither man nor woman had none on the dumb animals owned by their victims.

A valuable Spanish ass belonging to Mr. M'Cowan of Tralee was saturated with paraffin, set on fire, and horribly burned.

A farmer named Lambert found the shoulder of a heifer had been smashed by some blunt instrument like a hammer. I myself had a couple of cows killed and salted.

It is a curious thing that the Irish and the Italian are the two most poetic and most sensitive races of Europe, and also are the two which exhibit the greatest indifference to the sufferings of dumb animals.

The distress in Kerry, of course, in the winter of 1879 had been as great as in the more famous famine, and I have heard the theory advanced in a London drawing-room that physical suffering renders uneducated people indifferent to any torture endured by animals. Personally, I should have thought a fellow feeling made us wondrous kind.

Reverting to matters with which I had more personal connection, an interesting episode occurred in June 1881, when The O'Donoghue moved the adjournment of the House of Commons to force a debate upon the subject of Lord Kenmare's estate, and I wrote a letter in the Times in reply, from which may be condensed the following facts:—

On the Cork estate, from 1878 to 1881, the evictions did not average one for each year for every two hundred tenants.

On the Limerick estate for five years there have been no evictions.

There is no need to trouble readers with any further correspondence on a topic on which no one could answer me except by abuse, which is no argument; nor will I inflict any of the letters in which Mr. Sexton was clearly proved in the wrong when he misrepresented the case of Pat Murphy of Rath.

As an example of the state of affairs, in Millstreet—a mere village—there were thirty cases of nocturnal raid in the month of August 1881, even while it was engaging the attention of Mr. T.O. Plunkett, R.M., Mr. French, chief of the detective department, two sub-inspectors, thirty-five constabulary, and fifty men of the 80th Regiment.

In the Daily Telegraph, with reference to the murder of Gallivan, near Castleisland, this remark appeared in a leader:—

'Horror-stricken humanity demands that an example be speedily made of the truculent and merciless ruffian who perpetrated this outrage.'

I quoted this in a letter the editor published, adding:—

'A few weeks after that occasion an old man named Flynn was shot within two miles of the place, because he paid his rent. His leg has since been amputated.'

Then I gave the following horrible case:—

A good fellow called M'Auliffe, whose arm was shot off, could have done the same. The poor chap could be seen walking about with one arm, deprived of the means of earning his bread, and no doubt moralising over the state of the law, which would compensate him for the loss of his cow, if he had one, but gave him nothing for the loss of his arm.

On Friday, November 18, 1881, two tenants, named Cronin and one O'Keefe, holding land from Lord Kenmare, came into my office in Killarney.

O'Keefe, an old man of seventy, was the spokesman, and said:—

'If you plase, sorr, we have the rint in our pocket, and would be glad to pay it if it were not for the fear that we have of being shot.'

To my lasting regret, I replied:—

'There is no danger. You must pay.'

They did, and on the Sunday week following, a band of marauders, headed by fife and drum, went to the houses of these men, and shot them in the presence of their families. All the flesh on the lower part of O'Keefe's legs was shot away, one of the Cronins was shot in the knee, but the other in the body.

Everybody in the neighbourhood knew the perpetrators of this ghastly outrage, but said:—

'What use would there be in our telling, as the jury would acquit them, and we should be shot?'

Then came this announcement, which caused great excitement in Killarney:—

My own opinion was that he showed great wisdom in abandoning the ungrateful locality where only man, debased by the Land League, was vile.

Outside my own folk, I found the people stiffer and less affable than formerly; but at no time had I any difficulty in obtaining or keeping domestic servants, though my wife got the majority from the neighbourhood of Edenburn.

I used to sit, on and off, on the bench as regularly as most of the other magistrates, whenever, indeed, my business permitted me to do so, and to my face no one ventured to abuse me.

Quite late in the bad times when I wanted a decree of ejectment against a fellow, the chairman, desiring to make peace, explained that his hesitation was entirely on my account, to save me from danger.

I replied that I had not quailed all those years, and I was too old to begin; so I had my decree, and that fellow's threats were as contemptuously treated as all the rest.

The Bank had a decree against a tenant of mine, and, having sold him out, entered into possession and put in a caretaker.

He was in occupation about eight hours, when he grew so frightened that he ran away. The tenant then went back into possession as a caretaker, whom nobody dared dislodge, and he promptly went to the Tralee Board of Guardians to obtain a pound a week as an evicted tenant.

Thus the Board of Guardians were utilising the money of the landlords in order to remunerate the men who were robbing them of their property.

If a tenant—who generally had some money—was evicted, a notice was served on the relieving officer to provide him with a conveyance, in which he was taken to the poorhouse; but if a farmer evicted a labourer—who had, perhaps, nothing but the suit of clothes in which he stood up—he was allowed to walk to the poorhouse as best he might, and, when he got there, he obtained no special relief.

It is true that the passing of the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act offered another opportunity to the Government for striking a severe blow, but it was frittered away, although, before it became law, many of the leaders of disorder left the country, dreading its provisions.

Instead, the isolated arrests revealed that the criminals were provided with special accommodation and superior fare.

A district officer, asked by Lord Spencer for his views on the Coercion Act, replied:—

'The only coercion I can perceive, your Excellency, is that people accustomed to live on potatoes and milk are forced to feed on salmon and wine.'

The last outrage I intend to mention in this chapter was a very remarkable one.

The voting was even, until Mr. A.E. Herbert came into the room and gave his casting vote against the involuntary tenant of the Kilmainham hostelry. For this he was murdered three days later, and by the crime they hoped to ensure that on the next occasion the landlords would abstain from voting at all.

That murder of Mr. Arthur Herbert on his return from Petty Sessions at Castleisland was one of the worst, and as an exhibition of infernal hatred and vengeance it transcended the murders of Lord Mountmorres and Lord Leitrim. It cannot be denied that Mr. Herbert committed acts of a harsh and overbearing character. He was a turbulent, headstrong man, brave to rashness and foolhardiness, and too fond of proclaiming his contempt for the people by whom he was surrounded. As a magistrate, sitting at Brosna Petty Sessions, he expressed his regret that he was not in command of a force when a riot occurred in that village, when he would have 'skivered the people with buckshot,' language brought under the notice of the Lord Chancellor and the House of Commons.

He was the son of a clergyman, and lived at Killeentierna House with his mother, a venerable old lady over eighty, he being himself forty-five. His income was estimated at about four hundred a year, and as his relations with tenantry were not harmonious, he never went out without a six-chambered revolver in his pocket. Physically he was very robust—over five feet ten in height, and very corpulent. In his own neighbourhood he always was known as 'Mr. Arthur.'

That night a further illustration of the vindictive ferocity of the outrage was given. The lawn in front of Killeentierna was patrolled regularly by some of the large body of police which at once occupied the house. On this lawn eleven lambs were grazing. At half-past two these were seen by the police to be all right. At daybreak the eleven were found stabbed with pitchforks—nine of them killed outright, and two wounded to death. This act, as wretched as it was daring, added a new horror to the crime.

Mr. Herbert's murder was received with such exuberant delight in Kerry that my steward said to me:—

'You would think, sir, that rent was abolished and the duty taken off whisky.'

Constabulary had for a long while to be told off to prevent his grave being desecrated.

That is a pretty tough outrage for optimistic philanthropists to consider when they are addicted to announcing how far our generations have progressed from barbarism.

One young and cheery Kerry landlord was very proud, about 1886, at the price of forty shillings being offered for his life by the Land League, whereas nearly all the others were only valued at half a sovereign apiece.

As a matter of fact, almost any one could have been shot at Castleisland if a sovereign were offered, for they cared no more for human life than for that of a rat. Parnell himself would have been shot by any one of a couple of dozen fellows willing to earn a dishonest living if a five-pound note had been locally put upon his head. A patriotic philanthropist, destitute of the bowels of compassion and of every dictate of humanity, might have saved a great deal of undeserved suffering if he had made this donation towards his 'removal'—a pretty euphemism of Land League coinage.

Most of that generation are dead, in gaol, or have emigrated. It would take the deuce of a big sum to tempt any Castleislander to-day to commit murder, except under provocation, and the same improvement is observable all over Ireland. I believe a hundred pounds might be put on the head of the least popular agent or landlord, and he might walk unscathed without police protection.

The charge was as follows:—

'These returns present a picture of the County Kerry such as can hardly be found in any country that has passed the confines of natural society and entered upon the duties and relations, and acknowledged the obligations, of civilised life. The law is defeated—perhaps I should rather say, has ceased to exist! Houses are attacked by night and day, even the midnight terror yielding to the noonday anxiety of crime! Person and life are assailed! The terrified inmates are wholly unable to do anything to protect themselves, and a state of terror and lawlessness prevails everywhere. Even some persons who possess means of information that are not open to me, profess to discern in the signs of public feeling, in the views of some hope and some fear, the expectation of something about to happen, something reaching far beyond partial, or local, or even agrarian, disturbance, and calculated to create a greater degree of alarm than anything we have witnessed, or anything that has happened.

'But, of course, you can easily understand that these things do not at all give you any idea of other forms of material injury that arise from crime and disturbance, in the loss of employment and the discouragement of capital, the injury to trade, and the multiplied consequences of all kinds detrimental to the community that arise from insecurity to personal property and life. And to all those evils we have to add another, and perhaps the worst of all—that of which you are all conscious, of which experience and observation reaches you every day in all the forms of social life—a system of unseen terrorism, a system of terror and tyranny that the well-disposed class of the community ought to detest and abhor, and in reference to which, on all sides, I have heard, in this county and other counties, one universal expression of desire—that some means should be found to put an end to it.