Chapter 18

DUBLIN, _Friday, March 9th._--At 7.40 this morning I took the train for Athy to visit the Luggacurren estates of Lord Lansdowne. Mr. Lynch, a resident magistrate here, some time ago kindly offered to show me over the place, but I thought it as well to take my chance with the people of Athy who are reported to have been very hot over the whole matter here, and so wrote to Mr. Lynch that I would find him at the Lodge, which is the headquarters of the property.

Athy is a neat, well-built little town, famous of old as a frontier fortress of Kildare. An embattled tower, flanked by small square turrets, guards a picturesque old bridge here over the Barrow, the bridge being known in the country as "Crom-a-boo," from the old war-cry of the Fitz-Geralds. It is a busy place now; and there was quite a bustle at the very pretty little station. I asked a friendly old porter which was the best hotel in the town. "The best? Ah! there's only one, and it's not the best--but there are worse--and it's Kavanagh's." I found it easily enough, and was ushered by a civil man, who emerged from the shop which occupies part of it, into a sort of reading-room with a green table. A rather slatternly but very active girl soon converted this into a neat breakfast-table, and gave me an excellent breakfast. The landlord found me a good car, and off I set for the residence of Father Maher, the curate of whom I had heard as one of the most fiery and intractable of the National League priests in this part of Ireland.

My jarvey was rather taciturn at first, but turned out to be something of a politician. He wanted Home Rule, one of his reasons being that then they "wouldn't let the Americans come and ruin them altogether, driving out the grain from the markets." About this he was very clear and positive. "Oh, it doesn't matter now whether the land is good or bad, America has just ruined the farmers entirely."

I told him I had always heard this achievement attributed to England. "Oh! that was quite a mistake! What the English did was to punish the men that stood up for Ireland. There was Mr. O'Brien. But for him there wasn't a man of Lord Lansdowne's people would have had the heart to stand up. He did it all; and now, what were they doing to him? They were putting him on a cold plank-bed on a stone floor in a damp cell!"

"But the English put all their prisoners in those cells, don't they?" I asked.

"And what of it, sir?" he retorted. "They're good enough for most of them, but not for a gentleman like Mr. O'Brien, that would spill the last drop of his heart's blood for Ireland!"

"But," I said, "they're doing just the same thing with Mr. Gilhooly, I hear."

"And who is Mr. Gilhooly, now? And it's not for the likes of him to complain and be putting on airs as if he was Mr. O'Brien!"

"Yes, it is a fine country for hunting!"

"Was it ever put down here, the hunting?"

"No, indeed! Sure, the people wouldn't let it be!"

"Not if Mr. O'Brien told them they must?" I queried.

"Mr. O'Brien; ah, he wouldn't think of such a thing! It brings money all the time to Athy, and sells the horses."

As to the troubles at Luggacurren, he was not very clear. "It was a beautiful place, Mr. Dunne's; we'd see it presently. And Mr. Dunne, he was a good one for sport. It was that, your honour, that got him into the trouble"--

"And Mr. Kilbride?"

"Oh, Mr. Kilbride's place was a very good place too, but not like Mr. Dunne's. And he was doing very well, Mr. Kilbride. He was getting a good living from the League, and he was a Member of Parliament. Oh, yes, he wasn't the only one of the tenants that was doing good to himself. There was more of them that was getting more than ever they made out of the land."[24]

"Was the land so bad, then?" I asked.

"No, there was as good land at Luggacurren as any there was in all Ireland; but," and here he pointed off to the crests of the hills in the distance, "there was a deal of land there of the estate on the hills, and it was very poor land, but the tenants had to pay as much for that as for the good property of Dunne and Kilbride."

"Do you know Mr. Lynch, the magistrate?" I asked. "If you do, look out for him, as he has promised to join me and show me the place."

"Oh no, sorr!" the jarvey exclaimed at once; "don't mind about him. Hell have his own car, and your honour won't want to take him on ours."

"Why not?" I persisted, "there's plenty of room."

"Oh! but indeed, sir, if it wasn't that you were going to the priest's, Father Maher, you wouldn't get a car at Athy--no, not under ten pounds!"

"Not under ten pounds," I replied. "Would I get one then for ten pounds?"

"It's a deal of money, ten pounds, sorr, and you wouldn't have a poor man throw away ten pounds?"

"Certainly not, nor ten shillings either. Is it a question of principle, or a question of price?"

The man looked around at me with a droll glimmer in his eye: "Ah, to be sure, your honour's a great lawyer; but he'll come pounding along with his big horse in his own car, Mr. Lynch; and sure it'll be quicker for your honour just driving to Father Maher's."

There was no resisting this, so I laughed and bade him drive on.

"Whose house is that?" I asked, as we passed a house surrounded with trees.

"Oh! that's the priest, Father Keogh--a very good man, but not so much for the people as Father Maher, who has everything to look after about them."

We came presently within sight of a handsome residence, Lansdowne Lodge, the headquarters of the estate. Many fine cattle were grazing in the fields about it.

"They are Lord Lansdowne's beasts," said my jarvey; "and it's the emergency men are looking after them."

Nearly opposite were the Land League huts erected on the holding of an unevicted tenant--a small village of neat wooden "shanties." On the roadway in front of these half-a-dozen men were lounging about. They watched us with much curiosity as we drove up, and whispered eagerly together.

"They're some of the evicted men, your honour," said my jarvey, with a twinkle in his eye; and then under his breath, "They'll be thinking your honour's came down to arrange it all. They think everybody that comes is come about an arrangement."

"Oh, then, they all want it arranged!"

"No; not all, but many of them do. Some of them like it well enough going about like gentlemen with nothing to do, only their hands in their pockets."

We turned out of the highway here and passed some very pretty cottages.

"No, they're not for labourers, your honour," said my jarvey; "the estate built them for mechanics. It's the tenants look after the labourers, and little it is they do for them."

Then, pointing to a ridge of hills beyond us, he said: "It was Kilbride's father, sir, evicted seventeen tenants on these hills--poor labouring men, with their families, many years ago,--and now he's evicted himself, and a Member of Parliament!"

Father Maher's house stands well off from the highway. He was not at home, being "away at a service in the hills," but would be back before two o'clock. I left my name for him, with a memorandum of my purpose in calling, and we drove on to see the bailiff of the estate, Mr. Hind. On the way we met Father Norris, a curate of the parish, in a smart trap with a good horse, and had a brief colloquy with him. Mr. Hind we found busy afield; a quiet, staunch sort of man. He spoke of the situation very coolly and dispassionately. "The tenants in the main were a good set of men--as they had reason to be, Lord Lansdowne having been not only a fair landlord, but a liberal and enterprising promoter of local improvements." I had been told in Dublin that Lord Lansdowne had offered a subscription of £200 towards establishing creameries, and providing high-class bulls for this estate. Similar offers had been cordially met by Lord Lansdowne's tenants in Kerry, and with excellent results. But here they were rejected almost scornfully, though accompanied by offers of abatement on the rents, which, in the case of Mr. Kilbride, for example, amounted to 20 per cent.

"How did this happen, the tenants being good men as you say?" I asked of Mr. Hind.

"Because they were unable to resist the pressure put on them by the two chief tenants, Kilbride and Dunne, with the help of the League. Kilbride and Dunne both lived very well." My information at Dublin was that Mr. Kilbride had a fine house built by Lord Lansdowne, and a farm of seven hundred acres, at a rent of £760, 10s. Mr. Dunne, who co-operated with him, held four town lands comprising 1304 acres, at a yearly rent of £1348, 15s. Upon this property Lord Lansdowne had expended in drainage and works £1993, 11s. 9d., and in buildings £631, 15s. 4d., or in all very nearly two years' rental. On Mr. Kilbride's holdings Lord Lansdowne had expended in drainage works £1931, 6s. 3d., and in buildings £1247, 19s. 5d., or in all more than four years' rental. Mr. Kilbride held his lands on life leases. Mr. Dunne held his smallest holding of 84 acres on a yearly tenure; his two largest holdings, one on a lease for 31 years from 1874, and the other on a life lease, and his fourth holding of 172 acres on a life lease.

Where does the hardship appear in all this to Mr. Dunne or Mr. Kilbride?

On Mr. Kilbride's holdings, for instance, Lord Lansdowne expended over £3000, for which he added to the rent £130 a year, or about 4 per cent., while he himself stood to pay 6-1/2 per cent, on the loans he made from the Board of Works for the expenditure. In the same way it was with Mr. Dunne's farms. They were mostly in grass, and Lord Lansdowne laid out more than £2500 on them, borrowed at the same rate from the Board, for which he added to the rent only £66 a year, or about 2-1/2 per cent. Mr. Kilbride was a Poor-Law Guardian, and Mr. Dunne a Justice of the Peace. The leases in both of these cases, and in those of other large tenants, seem to have been made at the instance of the tenants themselves, and afforded security against any advance in the rental during a time of high agricultural prices. And it would appear that for the last quarter of a century there has been no important advance in the rental. In 1887 the rental was only £300 higher than in 1862, though during the interval the landlord had laid out £20,000 on improvements in the shape of drainage, roads, labourers' cottages, and other permanent works. Moreover, in fifteen years only one tenant has been evicted for non-payment of rent.

"Was there any ill-feeling towards the Marquis among the tenants?" I asked of Mr. Hind.

"Certainly not, and no reason for any. They were a good set of men, and they would never have gone into this fight, only for a few who were in trouble, and I'm sure that to-day most of them would be thankful if they could settle and get back. The best of them had money enough, and didn't like the fight at all."

All the trouble here seems to have originated with the adoption of the Plan of Campaign.

Lord Lansdowne, besides this estate in Queen's County, owns property in a wild, mountainous part of the county of Kerry. On this property the tenants occupy, for the most part, small holdings, the average rental being about £10, and many of the rentals much lower. They are not capitalist farmers at all, and few of them are able to average the profits of their industry, setting the gains of a good, against the losses of a bad, season. In October 1886, while Mr. Dillon was organising his Plan of Campaign, Lord Lansdowne visited his Kerry property to look into the condition of the people. The local Bank had just failed, and the shopkeepers and money-lenders were refusing credit and calling in loans. The pressure they put upon these small farmers, together with the fall in the price of dairy produce and of young stock at that time, caused real distress, and Lord Lansdowne, after looking into the situation, offered, of his own motion, abatements varying from 25 to 35 per cent, to all of them whose rents had not been judicially fixed under the Act of 1881, for a term of fifteen years.

As to these, Lord Lansdowne wrote a letter on the 21st of October 1886 (four days after the promulgation of the Plan of Campaign at Portumna on the Clanricarde property), to his agent, Mr. Townsend Trench. This letter was published. I have a copy of it given to me in Dublin, and it states the case as between the landlords and the tenants under judicial rents most clearly and temperately.

"It might, I think," says the Marquis, "be very fairly argued, that the State having imposed the terms of a contract on landlord and tenant, that contract should not be interfered with except by the State.

"The punctual payment of the 'judicial rent' was the one advantage to which the landlords were desired to look when, in 1881, they were deprived of many of the most valuable attributes of ownership.

"It was distinctly stipulated that the enormous privileges which were suddenly and unexpectedly conferred upon the tenants were to be enjoyed by them conditionally upon the fulfilment on their part of the statutory obligations specified in the Act. Of those, by far the most important was the punctual payment of the rent fixed by the Court for the judicial term.

"This obligation being unfulfilled, the landlord might reasonably claim that he should be free to exercise his own discretion in determining whether any given tenancy should or should not be perpetuated.

"In many cases [such cases are probably not so numerous on my estate as upon many others] the resumption of the holding, and the consolidation of adjoining farms, would be clearly advantageous to the whole community. In the congested districts the consolidation of farms is the only solution that I have seen suggested for meeting a chronic difficulty.

"I have no reason to believe that the Judicial Rents in force on my estate are such that, upon an average of the yield and prices of agricultural produce, my tenants would find it difficult to pay them."

In spite of all these considerations Lord Lansdowne instructed Mr. Trench to grant to these tenants under judicial leases an abatement of 20 per cent. on the November gale of 1886. This abatement, freely offered, was gladly accepted. There had been no outrages or disturbances on the Kerry properties, and the relations of the landlord with his tenants, before and after this visit of Lord Lansdowne to Kerry, and these reductions which followed it, had been, and continued to be, excellent.

But the tale of Kerry reached Luggacurren; and certain of the tenants on the latter estate were moved by it to demand for the Queen's County property identical treatment with that accorded to the very differently situated property in Kerry.

The leaders of the Luggacurren movement, I gather from Mr. Hind, never pretended inability to pay their rents. They simply demanded abatements of 35 per cent. on non-judicial, and 25 per cent. on judicial, rents as their due, on the ground that they should be treated like the tenants in Kerry: and the Plan of Campaign being by this time in full operation in more than one part of Ireland, they threatened to resort to it if their demand was refused. Lord Lansdowne at once declared that he would not repeat at Luggacurren his concession made in Kerry as to the rents judicially fixed; but he offered on a fair consideration of the non-judicial rents to make abatements on them ranging from 15 to 25 per cent.

The offer was refused, and the war began. On the 23d of March 1887 Mr. Kilbride was evicted. One week afterwards, on the 29th of March, he got up in the rooms of the National League in Dublin, and openly declared that "the Luggacurren evictions differed from most other evictions in this, that they were able to pay the rent. It was a fight," he exultingly exclaimed, "of intelligence against intelligence; it was diamond cut diamond!" In other words, it was a struggle, not for justice, but for victory.

On all these points, and others furnished to me at Dublin touching this estate, much light was thrown by the bailiff, who had not been concerned in the evictions. He told me what he knew, and then very obligingly offered to conduct me to the lodge, where we should find Mr. Hutchins, who has charge now of the properties taken up by Mr. Kavanagh's Land Corporation. My patriotic jarvey from Athy made no objection to my giving the bailiff a lift, and we drove off to the lodge. On the way the jarvey good-naturedly exclaimed, "Ah! there comes Mr. Lynch," and even offered to pull up that the magistrate might overtake us.

We found Mr. Hutchins at home, a cool, quiet, energetic, northern man, who seems to be handling the difficult situation here with great firmness and prudence. Mrs. Hutchins, who has lived here now for nearly a year--a life not unlike that of the wife of an American officer on the Far Western frontier--very amicably asked me to lunch, and Mr. Hutchins offered to show me the holdings of Mr. Dunne and Mr. Kilbride. Mr. Lynch proposed that we should all go on my car, but I remembered the protest of the jarvey, and sending him to await me at Father Maher's, I drove off with Mr. Hutchins. As we drove along, he confirmed the jarvey's hint as to the difference between the views and conduct of the parish priest and the views and conduct of his more fiery curate. This is a very common state of affairs, I find, all over Ireland.

The house of Mr. Dunne is that of a large gentleman farmer. It is very well fitted up, but it was plain that the tenants had done little or nothing to make or keep it a "house beautiful." The walls had never been papered, and the wood-work showed no recent traces of the brush. "He spent more money on horse-racing than on housekeeping," said a shrewd old man who was in the house. In fact, Mr. Dunne, I am told, entered a horse for the races at the Curragh after he had undergone what Mr. Gladstone calls "the sentence of death" of an eviction!

Some of the doors bore marks of the crowbar but no great mischief had been done to them or to the large fine windows. The only serious damage done during the eviction was the cutting of a hole through the roof. An upper room had been provisioned to stand a siege, and so scientifically barricaded with logs and trunks of trees that after several vain attempts to break through the door the assailants climbed to the roof, and in twenty minutes cut their way in from without. The dining and drawing rooms were those of a gentleman's residence, and one of the party remembered attending here a social festivity got up with much display.

A large cattle-yard has been established on this place, with an original, and, as I was assured, most successful weighing-machine by the Land Corporation. We found it full of very fine-looking cattle, and Mr. Hutchins seems to think the operation of managing the estate as a kind of "ranch" decidedly promising. "I am not a bit sorry for Mr. Dunne," he said, "but I am very sorry for other quiet, good tenants who have been deluded or driven into giving up valuable holdings to keep him and Mr. Kilbride company, and give colour to the vapourings of Mr. William O'Brien."

The cases of some of these tenants were instructive. One poor man, Knowles, had gone out to America, and regularly sent home money to his family to pay the rent. They found other uses for it, and when the storm came he was two years and a half in arrears. In another instance, two brothers held contiguous holdings, and were in a manner partners. One was fonder of Athy than of agriculture; the other a steady husbandman. Four years' arrears had grown up against the one; only a half-year's gale against the other. Clearly this difference originated outside of the fall of prices! In a third case, a tenant wrote to Mr. Trench begging to have something done, as he had the money to pay, and wanted to pay, but "didn't dare."

From Mr. Dunne's we drove to Mr. Kilbride's, another ample, very comfortable house--not so thoroughly well fitted up with bathroom and other modern appurtenances as Mr. Dunne's perhaps--but still a very good house. It stands on a large green knoll, rather bare of trees, and commands a fine sweep of landscape.

Mr. Hutchins drove me to the little road which leads up past the "Land League village" to the house of Father Maher, and there set me down.

I walked up and found the curate at home--a tall, slender, well-made young priest, with a keen, intelligent face. He received me very politely, and, when I showed him the card of an eminent dignitary of the Church, with cordiality.

I found him full of sympathy with the people of his parish, but neither vehement nor unfair. He did not deny that there were tenants on Lord Lansdowne's estate who were amply able to pay their rents; but he did most emphatically assert that there were not a few of them who really could not pay their rents.

"I assure you," he said, "there are some of them who cannot even pay their dues to their priest, and when I say that, you will know how pinched and driven they must indeed be." It was in view of these tenants that he seemed to justify the course of Mr. Dunne and Mr. Kilbride. "They must all stand or fall together." He had nothing to say to the discredit of Lord Lansdowne; but he spoke with some bitterness of the agent, Mr. Townsend Trench, as having protested against Lord Lansdowne's making reductions here while he had himself made the same reductions on the neighbouring estate of Mrs. Adair.

"In truth," he said, "Mr. Trench has made all this trouble worse all along. He is too much of a Napoleon"--and with a humorous twinkle in his eye as he spoke--"too much of a Napoleon the Third.

"I was just reading his father's book when you came in. Here it is," and he handed me a copy of Trench's _Realities of Irish Life_.

"Did you ever read it? This Mr. Trench, the father, was a kind of Napoleon among agents in his own time, and the son, you see, thinks it ought to be understood that he is quite as great a man as his father. Did you never hear how he found a lot of his father's manuscripts once, and threw them all in the fire, calling out as he did so, 'There goes some more of my father's vanity?'"

About his people, and with his people, Father Maher said he "felt most strongly." How could he help it? He was himself the son of an evicted father.

"Of course, Father Maher," I said, "you will understand that I wish to get at both sides of this question and of all questions here. Pray tell me then, where I shall find the story of the Luggacurren property most fully and fairly set forth in print?"

Without a moment's hesitation he replied, "By far the best and fairest account of the whole matter you will get in the Irish correspondence of the London _Times_."

How the conflict would end he could not say. But he was at a loss to see how it could pay Lord Lansdowne to maintain it.

He very civilly pressed me to stay and lunch with him, but when I told him I had already accepted an invitation from Mr. Hutchins, he very kindly bestirred himself to find my jarvey.

I hastened back to the lodge, where I found a very pleasant little company. They were all rather astonished, I thought, by the few words I had to say of Father Maher, and especially by his frank and sensible recommendation of the reports in the London _Times_ as the best account I could find of the Luggacurren difficulty. To this they could not demur, but things have got, or are getting, in Ireland, I fear, to a point at which candour, on one side or the other of the burning questions here debated, is regarded with at least as much suspicion as the most deliberate misrepresentation. As to Mr. Town send Trench, what Father Maher failed to tell me, I was here told: That down to the time of the actual evictions he offered to take six months' rent from the tenants, give them a clean book, and pay all the costs. To refuse this certainly looks like a "war measure."

But for the loneliness of her life here, Mrs. Hutchins tells me she would find it delightful. The country is exceedingly lovely in the summer and autumn months.

When my car came out to take me back to Athy, I found my jarvey in excellent spirits, and quite friendly even with Mr. Hutchins himself. He kept up a running fire of lively commentaries upon the residents whose estates we passed.

"Would you think now, your honour," he said, pointing with his whip to one large mansion standing well among good trees, "that that's the snuggest man there is about Athy? But he is; and it's no wonder! Would you believe it, he never buys a newspaper, but he walks all the way into Athy, and goes about from the bank to the shops till he finds one, and picks it up and reads it. He's mighty fond of the news, but he's fonder, you see, of a penny!

"There now, your honour, just look at that house! It's a magistrate he is that lives there; and why? Why, just to be called 'your honour,' and have the people tip their hats to him. Oh! he delights in that, he does. Why, you might knock a man, or put him in the water, you might, indeed, but if you came before Mr.----, and you just called him 'your honour' often enough, and made up to him, you'd be all right! You've just to go up to him with your hat in your hand, looking up at him, and to say, 'Ah! now, your honour'" (imitating the wheedling tone to perfection), "and indeed you'd get anything out of him--barring a sixpence, that is, or a penny!

"Ah! he's a snug one, too!" And with that he launched a sharp thwack of the whip at the grey mare, and we went rattling on apace.

At the very pretty station of Athy we parted the best of friends. "Wish you safe home, your honour." The kindly railway porter, also, who had recommended Kavanagh's Hotel, was anxious to know how I found it, and so busied himself to get me a good carriage when the train came in, that I feel bound to exempt Athy from the judgment passed by Sir James Allport's committee against the "amenities of railway travelling in Ireland."

DUBLIN, _Saturday, March 10._--I called by appointment to-day upon Mr. Brooke, the owner of the Coolgreany estate, at his counting-house in Gardiner's Row. It is one of the spacious old last-century houses of Dublin; the counting-room is installed with dark, old-fashioned mahogany fittings, in what once was, and might easily again be made, a drawing-room. Pictures hang on the walls, and the atmosphere of the whole place is one of courtesy and culture rather than of mere modern commerce. One of the portraits here is that of Mr. Brooke's granduncle--a handsome, full-blooded, rather testy-looking old warrior, in the close-fitting scarlet uniform of the Prince Regent's time.

"He ought to have been called Lord Baltimore," said Mr. Brooke good-naturedly; "for he fought against your people for that city at Bladensburg with Ross."

"That was the battle," I said, "in which, according to a popular tradition in my country, the Americans took so little interest that they left the field almost as soon as it began."

Another portrait is of a kinsman who was murdered in the highway here in Ireland many years ago, under peculiarly atrocious circumstances, and with no sort of provocation or excuse.

Mr. Brooke confirmed Dr. Dillon's statement that he had ordered out of his counting-house two tenants who came into it with a peculiarly brazen proposition, of which I must presume Dr. Dillon was ignorant when he cited the fact as a count against the landlord of Coolgreany. I give the story as Mr Brooke tells it. "The Rent Audit," he says, "at which my tenants were idiots enough to join the Plan of Campaign occurred about the 12th December 1886, when, as you know, I refused to accept the terms which they proposed to me. I heard nothing more from them till about the middle of February 1887, when coming to my office one day I found two tenants waiting for me. One was Stephen Maher, a mountain man, and the other Patrick Kehoe. 'What do you want?' I asked. Whereupon they both arose, and Pat Kehoe pointed to Maher. Maher fumbled at his clothes, and rubbed himself softly for a bit, and then produced a scrap of paper. 'It's a bit of paper from the tenants, sir,' he said. A queer bit of paper it was to look at--ruled paper, with a composition written upon it which might have been the work of a village schoolmaster. It was neither signed nor addressed! The pith of it was in these words,--'in consequence of the manner in which we have been harassed, our cattle driven throughout the country, and our crops not sown, we shall be unable to pay the half-year's rent due in March, in addition to the reduction already claimed!' I own I rather lost my temper at this! Remember I had already plainly refused to give 'the reduction already claimed,' and had told them not once, but twenty times, that I would never surrender to the 'Plan of Campaign'! I am afraid my language was Pagan rather than Parliamentary--but I told them plainly, at least, that if they did not break from the Plan of Campaign, and pay their debts, they might be sure I would turn the whole of them out! I gave them back their precious bit of paper and sent them packing.

"One of them, I have told you, was a mountain man, Stephen Maher. He is commonly known among the people as 'the old fox of the mountain,' and he is very proud of it!

"This old Stephen Maher," said Mr. Brooke, "is renowned in connection with a trial for murder, at which he was summoned as a witness. When he was cross-examined by Mr. Molloy, Q.C., he fenced and dodged about with that distinguished counsellor for a long time, until getting vexed by the lawyer's persistency, he exclaimed, 'Now thin, Mr. Molloy, I'd have ye to know that I had a cliverer man nor iver you was, Mr. Molloy, at me, and I had to shtan' up to him for three hours before the Crowner, an' he was onable to git the throoth out of me, so he was! so he was!'"

Neither did Dr. Dillon mention the fact that one of the demands made of Captain Hamilton, Mr. Brooke's agent, in December 1886, was that a Protestant tenant named Webster should be evicted by Mr. Brooke from a farm for which he had paid his rent, to make room for the return thither of a Roman Catholic tenant named Lenahan, previously evicted for non-payment of his rent.

When Mr. Brooke's grandfather bought the Coolgreany property in 1864, he adopted a system of betterments, which has been ever since kept up on the estate. Nearly every tenant's house on the property has been slated, and otherwise repaired by the landlord, nor has one penny ever been added on that account to the rents.

In the village of Coolgreany all the houses on one side of the main street were built in this way by the landlord, and the same thing was done in the village of Croghan, where twenty tenants have a grazing right of three sheep for every acre held on the Croghan Mountain, pronounced by the valuers of the Land Court to be one of the best grazing mountains in Ireland.

Captain Hamilton became the agent of the property in 1879, on the death of Mr. Vesey. One of his earliest acts was to advise Mr. Brooke to grant an abatement of 25 per cent. in June 1881, while the Land Act was passing. At the same time, he cautioned the tenants that this was only a temporary reduction, and advised them to get judicial rents fixed.

The League advised them not to do this, but to demand 25 per cent. reduction again in December 1881. This demand was rejected, and forty writs were issued. The tenants thereupon in January 1882 came in and paid the full rent, with the costs.

Eleven tenants after this went into Court, and in 1883 the Sub-Commissioners cut down their rents. In five cases Mr. Brooke appealed. What was the result before the Chief Commissioner? The rent of Mary Green, which had been £43, and had been cut down by the Sub-Commissioners to £39, was restored to £43; the rent of Mr. Kavanagh, cut down from £57 to £52, was restored to £55; the rent of Pat Kehoe (one of the two tenants "ejected" from Mr. Brooke's office as already stated), cut down from £81 to £70, was restored to £81; the rent of Graham, cut down from £38 to £32, 10s., was restored to £38. Other reductions were maintained.

This appears to be the record of "rack-renting" on the Coolgreany property.

There are 114 tenants, of whom 15 hold under judicial rents; 22 are leaseholders, and 77 are non-judicial yearly tenants. There are 12 Protestants holding in all a little more than 1200 acres. All the rest are Catholics, 14 of these being cottier tenants. The estate consists of 5165 acres. The average is about £24, and the average rental about £26, 10s. The gross rental is £2614, of which £1000 go to the jointure of Mr. Brooke's mother, and £800 are absorbed by the tithe charges, half poor-rates and other taxes. During the year 1886, in which this war was declared against him, Mr. Brooke spent £714 in improvements upon the property: so in that year his income from Coolgreany was practically _nil_.

What in these circumstances would have been the position of this landlord had he not possessed ample means not invested in this particular estate? And what has been the result to the tenants of this conflict into which it seems clear that they were led, less to protect any direct interest of their own than to jeopardise their homes and their livelihood for the promotion of a general agrarian agitation? It is not clear that they are absolutely so far out of pocket, for I find that the Post-Office Savings Bank deposits at Inch and Gorey rose from £3699, 5s. 4d. in 1880 to £5308, 13s. in 1887, showing an increase of £1609, 7s. 8d. But they are out of house and home and work, entered pupils in that school of idleness and iniquity which has been kept by one Preceptor from the beginning of time.