From Abbeyleix station we walked back to the house through the park under trees beautifully silvered with the snow.  At dinner the party was joined by several residents of the county.  One of them gave me his views of the working of the “Plan of Campaign.”  It is a plan, he maintains, not of defence as against unjust and exacting landlords, but of offence against “landlordism,” not really promoted, as it appears to be, in the interest of the tenants to whose cupidity it appeals, but worked from Dublin as a battering engine against law and order in Ireland.  Every case in which it is applied needs, he thinks, to be looked into on its own merits.  It will then be found precisely why this or that spot has bees selected by the League for attack.  At Luggacurren, for instance, the “Plan of Campaign” has been imposed upon the tenants because the property belongs to the Marquis of Lansdowne, who happens to be Governor-General of Canada, so that to attack him is to attack the Government.  The rents of the Lansdowne property at Luggacurren, this gentleman offers to prove to me, are not and never have been excessive; and Lord Lansdowne has expended very large sums on improving the property, and for the benefit of the tenants.  Two of the largest tenants having got into difficulties through reckless racing and other forms of extravagance found it convenient to invite the league into Luggacurren, and compel other tenants in less embarrassed circumstances to sacrifice their holdings by refusing to pay rents which they knew to be fair, and were abundantly able and eager to pay.  At Mitchelstown the “Plan of Campaign” was aimed again, not at the Countess of Kingston, the owner, but at the Disestablished Protestant Church of Ireland, the trustees of which hold a mortgage of a quarter of a million sterling on the estates.  On the Clanricarde property in Galway the “Plan of Campaign” has been introduced, my informant says, because Lord Clanricarde happens to be personally unpopular.  “Go down to Portumna and Woodford,” he said, “and look into the matter for yourself.  You will find that the rents on the Clanricarde estates are in the main exceptionally fair, and even low.  The present Marquis has almost never visited Ireland, I believe, and he is not much known even in London.  People who dislike him for one reason or another readily believe anything that is said to his disadvantage as a landlord.  Most people who don’t like the cut of Dr. Fell’s whiskers, or the way in which he takes soup, are quite disposed to listen to you if you tell them he beats his wife or plays cards too well.  The campaigners are shrewd fellows, and they know this, so they start the ‘Plan of Campaign’ on the Portumna properties, and get a lot of English windbags to come there and hobnob with some of the most mischievous and pestilent parish priests in all Ireland—­and then you have the dreadful story of the ‘evictions,’ and all the rest of it.  Lord Clanricarde, or his agent, or both of them, getting out of temper,