will sit down and do some hasty or crabbed or injudicious thing, or write a provoking letter, and forthwith it is enough to say ‘Clanricarde,’ and all common sense goes out of the question, to the great damage, not so much of Lord Clanricarde—­for he lives in London, and is a rich man, and, I suppose, don’t mind the row—­but of landlords all over Ireland, and therefore, in the long-run, of the tenants of Ireland as well.”

At Luggacurren, this gentleman thinks, the League is beaten.  There are eighty-two tenants there, evicted and living dismally in what is called the Land League village, a set of huts erected near the roadside, while their farms are carried on for the owner by the Land Corporation.  As they were most of them unwilling to accept the Plan, and were intimidated into it for the benefit of the League, and of the two chief tenants, Mr. Dunn and Mr. Kilbride, men of substance who had squandered their resources, the majority of the evicted are sore and angry.

“At first each man was allowed L3 a month by the League for himself and his family.  But they found that Mr. Kilbride, who has been put into Parliament by Mr. Parnell for Kerry, a county with which he has no more to do than I have with the Isle of Skye, was getting L5 a week, and so they revolted, and threatened to bolt if their subsidy was not raised to L4 a month.”

“And this they get now?  Out of what funds?”

“Out of the League funds, or, in other words, out of their own and other people’s money, foolishly put by the tenants into the keeping of the League to ‘protect’ it!  They give it the kind of ‘protection’ that Oliver gave the liberties of England:  once they get hold of it, they never let go!”

I submitted that at Gweedore Father M’Fadden had paid over to Captain Hill the funds confided to him.

“No doubt; but there the landlord gave in, and the more fool he!”

With another guest I had an interesting conversation about the Ulster tenant-right, which got itself more or less enacted into British law only in 1870, and of which Mr. Froude tells me he sought in vain to discover the definite origin.  “The best lawyers in Ireland” could give him no light on this point.  He could only find that it did not exist apparently in 1770, but did exist apparently twenty years later.  The gentleman with whom I talked to-night tells me that the custom of Ulster was really once general throughout Ireland, and is called the “Ulster” custom, only because it survived there after disappearing elsewhere.  There is a tradition too, he says, in Ulster that the recognition of this tenant-right as a binding custom there is really due to Lord Castlereagh.  It would be a curious thing, could this be verified, to find Lord Castlereagh, whose name has been execrated in Ireland for fourscore years, recommending and securing a century ago that recognition of the interest of the Irish tenant in his holding, which, in our time, Mr. Gladstone, just now the object of Irish adulation, was, with much difficulty and reluctance, brought to accord in the Compensation for Disturbances clause of his Act of 1870!