tting" any man who
does this as a "land-grabber."

The ultimate sanction of the "boycott" being "murder," derelict farms
increased under this system very rapidly; and the Eleventh Commandment
of the League, "Thou shalt not pay the rent which thy neighbour hath
refused to pay," was in a fair way to dethrone the Ten Commandments of
Sinai throughout Ireland, even before the formal adoption in 1886 of the
"Plan of Campaign."

Mr. Gladstone would perhaps have hit the facts more accurately, if,
instead of calling an eviction in Ireland a "sentence of death," he had
called the taking of a tenancy a sentence of death. Mr. Hussey at Lixnaw
had two tenants, Edmond and James Fitzmaurice. Edmond Fitzmaurice was
"evicted" in May 1887; but he was taken into the house of a neighbour,
made very comfortable, and still lives. James Fitzmaurice took, for the
sake of the family, the land from which Edmond was evicted, and for this
he was denounced as a "land-grabber," boycotted, and finally shot dead
in the presence of his daughter.

At a meeting in Dublin in the autumn of 1885, a parish priest, the Rev.
Mr. Cantwell, described it as a "cardinal virtue" that "no one should
take a farm from which another had been evicted," and called upon the
people who heard him to "pass any such man by unnoticed, and treat him
as an enemy in their midst." Public opinion and the law, if not the
authorities of his church would make short work of any priest who talked
in this fashion in New York. But in Ireland, and under the British
Government, it seems they order things differently. So it occurred one
day to the landlords thus assailed, as it did to the sea-lions of the
Cape of Good Hope when the French sailors attacked them, that they might
defend themselves.

To this end the Land Corporation was instituted, with a considerable
capital at its back, and Mr. Kavanagh at its head. The "plan of
campaign" of this Corporation is to take over from the landlords
derelict lands and cultivate them, stocking them where that is
necessary.

It is in this way that the derelict lands on the Ponsonby property at
Youghal are now worked. But Mr. Kavanagh tells me that the men employed
by the Corporation, of whom Father Keller spoke as a set of desperadoes
or "_enfants perdus_," are really a body of resolute and capable working
men farmers. Many, but by no means all of them, are Protestants and
Ulstermen; and that they are up to their work would seem to be shown by
t