he adoption of the
Plan of Campaign.

Lord Lansdowne, besides this estate in Queen's County, owns property in
a wild, mountainous part of the county of Kerry. On this property the
tenants occupy, for the most part, small holdings, the average rental
being about L10, and many of the rentals much lower. They are not
capitalist farmers at all, and few of them are able to average the
profits of their industry, setting the gains of a good, against the
losses of a bad, season. In October 1886, while Mr. Dillon was
organising his Plan of Campaign, Lord Lansdowne visited his Kerry
property to look into the condition of the people. The local Bank had
just failed, and the shopkeepers and money-lenders were refusing credit
and calling in loans. The pressure they put upon these small farmers,
together with the fall in the price of dairy produce and of young stock
at that time, caused real distress, and Lord Lansdowne, after looking
into the situation, offered, of his own motion, abatements varying from
25 to 35 per cent, to all of them whose rents had not been judicially
fixed under the Act of 1881, for a term of fifteen years.

As to these, Lord Lansdowne wrote a letter on the 21st of October 1886
(four days after the promulgation of the Plan of Campaign at Portumna on
the Clanricarde property), to his agent, Mr. Townsend Trench. This
letter was published. I have a copy of it given to me in Dublin, and it
states the case as between the landlords and the tenants under judicial
rents most clearly and temperately.

"It might, I think," says the Marquis, "be very fairly argued, that the
State having imposed the terms of a contract on landlord and tenant,
that contract should not be interfered with except by the State.

"The punctual payment of the 'judicial rent' was the one advantage to
which the landlords were desired to look when, in 1881, they were
deprived of many of the most valuable attributes of ownership.

"It was distinctly stipulated that the enormous privileges which were
suddenly and unexpectedly conferred upon the tenants were to be enjoyed
by them conditionally upon the fulfilment on their part of the statutory
obligations specified in the Act. Of those, by far the most important
was the punctual payment of the rent fixed by the Court for the judicial
term.

"This obligation being unfulfilled, the landlord might reasonably claim
that he should be free to exercise his own discretion in determining
whether any give