Chapter 19

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.

A labourer of the M'Gillycuddys was visited by another Land League detachment and had his ear, _à la_ Bulgaria, cut clean off to the bone, because he worked on a farm from which a tenant had been evicted.

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.

Captain Boycott was agent for Lord Erne's Mayo estates, and laid out the whole of his capital £6000, in improving and stocking his own property. Because, in the course of his duty, he served some ejectment notices, he was denounced by the Land League, his farm servants were terrorised into leaving his employment, and when he imported fifty labourers from the north of Ireland to save his crops, the Government had to despatch a small army corps of troops and constabulary to protect them. So great was the power of the League, that even in Dublin the landlord of a hotel declined to let him stop more than twenty-four hours in the house, as he was threatened if he ventured to harbour him. For the protection of his life and no more, the unfortunate gentleman had to leave the country.

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.'

Old Hussey--to use their accurate nomenclature--popped his head out of the window, and also his right hand which held a most serviceable revolver and invited them to come on.

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.

There is a man hobbling about Castleisland to this day, who was peppered in this comparatively humanitarian way. I am quite sure he would say such a comparison had proved odious.

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.

Mr. Parnell started the whole vile crusade, when at Ennis he gave the advice to shun any man who had bid for a farm from which a tenant had been evicted.

'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 farmer, name of Brown, was shot at Castleisland. Two men were arrested for the murder, and were twice tried before Cork juries. The first disagreed, but the second found them guilty.

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 Gladstonian Attorney-General, in order to curry popularity, declined to challenge the jury, when the first man was put on his trial. Consequently three cousins of the prisoner were impanelled, the jury disagreed, and the wretch bolted to America that same night.

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.

One of the worst features, however, of all this terrible period was that helpless girls and women were victims as well as men, I know of a case where some ruffians entered the house of a family at night, went into the bedroom of one of the girls, seized her violently, forced her on her knees, and held her in that position while one of the gang cut off her hair with shears, and then poured a quantity of hot tar on her head before entering the bedroom of her sister to do the same.

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.

Indeed cattle outrages became incidents of nightly occurrence. Tenants in all disturbed counties, besides having their houses burnt, saw their cattle so horribly mutilated that the poor dumb creatures had to be killed to put them out of their misery. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals would have no chance of obtaining general support among the lower classes in Kerry, where beasts belonging to your enemy are simply regarded as so many goods and chattels, to be as badly damaged as possible.

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.

On the Kerry estate, since he succeeded (in 1871), Lord Kenmare has expended £67,115 on drainage, road-making, and building cottages. The evictions have been about one in five hundred in every half year. The abatements, allowances, and expenditure in 1878, '79, '80, and '81, exclusive of what was spent on the house and demesne, were, £33,645, and I am under the mark when I say that, altogether, for these years of distress, Lord Kenmare spent more on his Kerry estates than he received out of it; yet for this, Land League meetings were held on his estate, and he was denounced in Parliament. The week that the Land League compelled Lord Kenmare to discontinue his employment to labourers, the weekly labour bill was £460.

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:--

On Sunday night the Land League police went to the house of a man named Dan Dooling, who lived within a mile of Gallivan's house, and within one mile of Castleisland, and because he paid his rent on getting a reduction of thirty per cent., he was taken out and shot in the thigh. His wife, who was only three days after her confinement, pleaded for mercy on this account, but these lynch law authorities were deaf to the appeal for mercy, and she did not recover the shock of the entry of these 'moonlight' Thugs. This man could have identified his assailants, but he did not dare.

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:--

'In consequence of the difficulty of getting his rents, the Earl of Kenmare has decided to leave the country for the present. All the labourers employed on the estate are discharged, as well as some of the gamekeepers.'

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.

At that time two-thirds of the poor-rate was paid by the landlord. When the tenancy was over £4 a year, they had to allow each tenant half the rate he paid; when it was under this sum, they had to pay the whole of it, and, of course, all the rates for land in their own occupation.

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.

There was a contest for the chairmanship of the Tralee Board of Guardians. The Land League put forward a candidate who was at the time an inmate of Kilmainham gaol. The landlords, who at this earlier stage still had some power, conceived that the residence of the Home Ruler would not facilitate his control over the Board, and chose a candidate whose abode was not only more adjacent, but whose movements were unfettered.

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.'

Leaving Castleisland about five in the afternoon, he was accompanied for about a mile by the head constable, who then turned back. Mr. Herbert had not proceeded a quarter of a mile further when he was felled by the assassins. The spot chosen was singularly open, no shelter being visible for some distance. Several shots were heard by a labourer at work in a quarry, and when he came up he found Mr. Herbert lying on his face in the road, quite dead, the earth about him being covered with pools of blood. The body was almost riddled with shot and bullets.

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.

The price of blood in Kerry was not high. For example, the men that murdered FitzMaurice were paid £5 for the job, and they had never seen him before. His family had to be under police protection for five years, and I managed to get £1000 subscribed for them in England, Mr. Froude taking an enthusiastic and generous interest in a very sad case. The victim left two daughters, who both married policemen.

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.

All that has been set forth in this chapter might be regarded as a heavy indictment of crime and disorder, but I cannot avoid adding one confirmatory piece of evidence, as eloquent as it is accurate. This is the fearful description of the state of Kerry which appears in Judge O'Brien's charge to the Grand Jury at the Assizes, founded, of course, on the report of outrages submitted to him. It is impossible to guess in what stronger words his opinions would have been expressed if the total number of outrages committed had been laid before him; but it is well known that only a few of those committed were reported, as, if the criminals were taken up and identified, the victims would be likely to be shot in revenge, while the guilty persons, tried by a sympathising jury, would obtain acquittal and popular advertisement.

The charge was as follows:--

'COLONEL CROSBIE AND GENTLEMEN OF THE GRAND JURY OF KERRY--I requested your permission to defer any observations I was about to make to you, in order that I might have an opportunity of examining certain returns which had been made to me containing materials for forming a judgment upon the state of things in this county of which I was put in possession upon my arrival, and I was desirous of being afforded an opportunity of examining these materials to try if I could discern whether, in the considerable lapse of time that has happened since the last Assizes, I could see any reason to conclude that an improvement had taken place in the state of things that has now so long existed in the County of Kerry, and other counties in the south of Ireland, to try if I could discern whether lapse of time itself, the weariness of that state of things, if the law and influences that lead persons to avoid violations of the law, or to follow the pursuits of industry, had led in the end to any favourable change in the state of things; but I grieve to say that it is not in my power, unfortunately, to announce that any change has taken place. On the contrary, all the means of information that I possess lead to the unhappy conclusion that there is no improvement, but that, on the contrary, there exists, even at this moment, a most extraordinary state of things--a state of things of an unprecedented description--nothing short, in fact, of a state of open war with all forms of authority, and even, I may say without exaggeration, with the necessary institutions of civilised life.

'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.

'When I come to compare the official returns of crime with those of the preceding period, I find that the total number of offences in this county since the last Assizes is somewhat less in number, even considerably less in number, than in the corresponding or the preceding period of the former years. But the diminution of number affords no assurance or ground of improvement at all, because I find that the diminution is accounted for entirely in the class of offences that acknowledges to some extent the power and influence of the law, namely, in threatening letters and notices, while the amount of open and actual crime is greater than it was in the former period, showing that there is an increased confidence in impunity, and that menace has given place to the deed. Within not more than ten days from the time that I am now speaking, not less than four examples of midnight invasion of houses in this county have occurred, accompanied with all the usual incidents of disguises and arms, and the firing of shots, and violence threatened or committed; in one instance the outrage having been committed upon the residence of a magistrate of this county, a man living with his family in his home, in the supposed delusive security of domestic life, of law, and respect for social station; and in another instance committed upon a humble man, and encountered, I am glad to say, in that instance, with a brave resistance, giving an example of courage which, if it were widely imitated, many of the evils that this country suffers from would no longer exist.

'I need not dwell upon the most aggravated instance of all which this calendar of crime presents--one that is quite recent, and within the memory of you all--the murder of Cornelius Murphy, a humble man, but one enjoying apparently the confidence and respect of all his neighbours, who had done no harm to any person, who was not conscious of any offence, whose house was invaded at a still early hour of the evening, and before the daylight had departed, by a band of men that is shown to have traversed a considerable distance of country, giving opportunities of recognition to many, and with hardly the pretext of an offence on his part, and in reality with the object of private plunder or private hostility--one of those motives that always take advantage of a state of disturbance in order to gratify private ends--slain in his own house in the presence of his own family. Certain persons, it would appear, have been arrested on a charge of complicity with this crime, and it may be that this cruel and wicked crime may be the means of discovering other crimes, and of leading in the end to the detection, if not to the conviction, of persons who have been connected in them, and those who rest in the supposed confidence of impunity may find the spell broken, may find the light of information to reach them, and may find in the end that the law will be able to prevail; because it must be in the experience of many of you that it is unhappily in the power of a few persons who engage in this system of nightly invasion of houses to multiply themselves, apparently by means of terror and intimidation, although at the same time there can be no doubt that, on account of interval of distances, and for many such reasons, there must be many such combinations in this country, acting entirely independent of each other.

'No person can be at a loss to understand the misery and suffering that arises from a state of crime; but perhaps all persons in the community do not equally understand one form of consequence to material prosperity that results from it. I have before me a document that contains most terribly significant evidence of mischief, alike to all classes of the community, that results from crime and a state of social disturbance. I have a return of malicious injuries which form the subject of presentment at these Assizes, in number, I understand, exceeding all former precedent. There are no less than eighty-six presentments, representing all forms of wicked outrage upon property, a tempest--I might say without exaggeration, a tempest--of violence and crime that has swept over a considerable portion of this county. The claims amount to £2700, with the result that the Grand Jury had presented upon a certain part of this county £1250, exercising apparently the greatest care and discrimination in reducing the amount of the claims, and this £1250 was not put upon the whole county, but on certain parts of the county, and the amount at the very least aggravated in a most serious degree the weight of taxation that falls upon the ratepayers of the County Kerry, deepening the difficulties that all classes alike must experience from the depression of the times, and from the other burdens they have to meet in providing against the demands that are made upon them.

'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.

'I possess no power myself to effect this state of things, and I cannot say that in the relation to the law which you fill as members of the Grand Jury, or in any other relation to the law, you possess the means to effect it. The duty of providing against so great an evil existing in the community--the duty and the obligation rests with others. My duty is simply confined to representing to you the state of things that exists, and, indeed, in that respect I know that I am doing what is entirely unnecessary, for the state of the County Kerry now, and for a period of five or six years, in all its essential features, is known far beyond the limits of the county, to every single person in the country. I will merely make use of one general observation--that I by no means share in the opinion that has been expressed as to the inability to deal with this state of things. On the contrary, I entertain the most perfect confidence that it is in the power of those who are intrusted with the duty of maintaining the public peace to re-establish order and law and peace in this county. And as my duty is confined to representing that state of things, that duty does not carry me to indicate to those on whom the responsibility rests the means to attain that object.'