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 L67,115 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, L33,645, 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 L460.

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 w