for man a match even for Captain Moonlight.  If these ladies dared to evict their non-paying tenants they would be either boycotted or “visited,” or perhaps both.  Besides, who would venture to take the vacant land?  And how could a couple of delicate ladies, say, till the ground with their own hands?  The old fable of the dog in the manger holds good with these Campaigners.  Those who will not pay prevent others who would; and the hated “landgrabber,” denounced from altar and platform alike, is simply an honest and industrious worker, who would make his own living and the landlord’s rent out of a bit of land which is lying idle and going to waste.

All through the disturbed districts we come upon facts like this—­upon the ruin and humiliation of kindly and delicately-nurtured ladies, of which the English public knows nothing; and while it hysterically pities the poor down-trodden peasant and goes in for Home Rule as the panacea, the wife of a tenant owing five years’ rent and refusing to pay one, dresses in costly attire—­and the lady proprietor knows penury and hunger; not to speak of the agonies of personal terror endured for months at a stretch.  Let us, who live in a well-ordered country, realize for a moment the mental condition of those who dwell in the shadow of assassination—­women to whom every unusual noise is as the sentence of death, and whose days are days of trembling, and their nights of anguish for the fear of death that encompasses them.  Is this according to the law of elemental justice?  Are our sympathies to be confined wholly to one class, and are the sorrows and the wrongs done to another not to count?  Surely it is time for some of the sentimental fog in which so many of us have been living to be dispelled in favour of the light of truth!

Here is an instructive little bit on which we would do well to ponder:—­

A certain authority gives the following anecdote:—­He says that he “has just had a long conversation with one of the leading Galway merchants.  ‘A farmer of this county,’ said he, ’told me yesterday that he had let his meadowing at L8 an acre.  I bought all his barley, and he confessed that on this crop too he had made L8 an acre.  Now the judicial rent of this man’s holding is 10s. the acre.  He said, “I have nothing to complain of."’ This man was a tenant of Lord Clanricarde; one of those people who decline to pay a farthing in the way of rent to the lawful owner of the soil.  The case we have cited may be an extreme one, but it is generally admitted by those who are acquainted with the facts, and who speak the truth that the rents on the Clanricarde property, speaking generally, are low rents, and yet not only is it impossible to collect these rents, but the agent who represents Lord Clanricarde, and whose only fault is that he tries to do his duty to his employer without unnecessary harshness to the tenantry, dare not go outside his house without an escort of police, and every time he leaves his house, he risks his life.  Referring to this agent, Mr. Tener, the correspondent says:—­