Of the tenants and their relation to the village despots who administer the Plan of Campaign, this gentleman had many stories also to tell of the same tenor with all that I have hitherto heard on this subject.  Everywhere it is the same thing.  The well-to-do and well-disposed tenants are coerced by the thriftless and shiftless.  “I have the agencies of several properties,” he said, “and in some of the best parts of Ireland.  I have had little or no trouble on any of them, for I have one uniform method.  I treat every tenant as if he were the only man I had to deal with, study his personal ways and character, humour him, and get him on my side against himself.  You can always do this with an Irishman if you will take the trouble to do it.  Within the past years I have had tenants come and tell me they were in fear the Plan of Campaign would be brought upon them, just as if it were a kind of potato disease, and beg me to agree to take the rent from them in that case, and just not discover on them that they had paid it before it was due!”

This gentleman is a pessimist as to the future.  “I am a youngish man still,” he said, “and a single man, and I am glad of it.  I don’t believe the English will ever learn how to govern this country, and I am sure it can never govern itself.  Would your people make a State of it?”

To this I replied that with Cuba and Canada and Mexico, all still to be digested and assimilated, I thought the deglutition of Ireland by the great Republic must be remitted to a future much too remote to interest either of us.

“I suppose so,” he said in a humorously despondent tone; “and so I see nothing for people who think as I do, but Australia or New Zealand!”

Mr. Kavanagh sees the future, I think, in colouring not quite so dark.  As a public man, familiar for years with the method and ways of British Parliaments, he seems to regard the possible future legislation of Westminster with more anxiety and alarm than the past or present agitations in Ireland.  The business of banishing political economy to Jupiter and Saturn, however delightful it may be to the people who make laws, is a dangerous one to the people for whom the laws are made.  While he has very positive opinions as to the wisdom of the concession made in the successive Land Acts for Ireland, which have been passed since 1870, he is much less disquieted, I think, by those concessions, than by the spirit by which the legislation granting them has been guided.  He thinks great good has been already done by Mr. Balfour, and that much more good will be done by him if the Irish people are made to feel that clamorous resistance to the law will no longer be regarded at Westminster as a sufficient reason for changing the law.  That is as much as to say that party spirit in Great Britain is the chief peril of Ireland to-day.  And how can any Irishman, no matter what his state in his own country may be, or his knowledge of Irish affairs, or his patriotic earnestness and desire for Irish prosperity, hope to control the tides of party spirit in England or Scotland?