After the train moved off, Mr. Gladstone said, “Was not that gentleman who so kindly vacated his place for us a clergyman?”

“Yes.”  “I hope he won’t think I have disestablished him again!”

At the next station, my informant getting out for a moment to thank the Dean again for his civility, and chat with him, repeated Mr. Gladstone’s remark.

“Oh!” said the Dean; “you may tell him I don’t mind his disestablishing me again; for he didn’t disendow me; he didn’t confiscate my ticket!”

With this gentleman was another from Kerry, who tells me there is a distinct change for the better already visible in that county, which he attributes to the steady action of the Dublin authorities in enforcing the law.

“The League Courts,” he said, “are ceasing to be the terror they used to be.”

I asked what he meant by the “League Courts,” when he expressed his astonishment at my not knowing that it was the practice of the League to hold regular Courts, before which the tenants are summoned, as if by a process of the law, to explain their conduct, when they are charged with paying their rents without the permission of the Local League.  In his part of Kerry, he tells me, these Courts used not very long ago to sit regularly every Sunday.  The idea, he says, is as old as the time of the United Irishmen, who used to terrorise the country just in the same way.  A man whom he named, a blacksmith, acted as a kind of “Law Lord,” and to him the chairmen of the different local “Courts” used to refer cases heard before them![5]

All this was testified to openly two years ago, before Lord Cowper’s Commission, but no decisive action has ever been taken by the Government to put a stop to the scandal, and relieve the tenants from this open tyranny.  These Courts enforced, and still enforce, their decrees by various forms of outrage, ranging “from the boycott,” in its simplest forms up to direct outrages upon property and the person.

“This dual Government business,” he said, “can only end in a duel between the two Governments, and it must be a duel to the death of one or the other.”

To-night at dinner I had a most interesting conversation with Mr. Colomb, Assistant Inspector-General of the Constabulary, who is here engaged with Mr. Cameron of Belfast, and Colonel Turner, in investigating the affair at Mitchelstown.  Mr. Colomb was at Killarney at the time of the Fenian rising under “General O’Connor” in 1867—­a rising which was undoubtedly an indirect consequence of our own Civil War in America.  Warning came to two magistrates, of impending trouble from Cahirciveen.  Upon this Mr. Colomb immediately ordered the arrest of all passengers to arrive that day at Killarney by the “stage-car” from that place.  When the car came in at night, it brought only one person—­“an awful-looking ruffian he was,” said Mr. Colomb, “whom, by his square-toed shoes, we knew to be just arrived from your side of the water.”