Of the details of the dealings of the private banks it is very hard to get an accurate account.  One gentleman, the manager of a branch of one important bank, tells me that a great deal of money is made by usurers out of the tenants, by backing their small bills.  This practice goes back to the first establishment of banks in Ireland.  Formerly it was not an uncommon thing for a landlord to offer his tenants a reduction, say, of twenty per cent., on condition of their paying the rent when it fell due.  Such were the relations then between landlord and tenants, and so little was punctuality expected in such payments that this might be regarded as a sort of discount arrangement.  The tenant who wished to avail himself of such an offer would go to some friendly local usurer and ask for a loan that he might avail himself of it.  “One of these usurers, whom I knew very well,” said the manager, “told me long ago that he found these operations very profitable.  His method of procedure was to agree to advance the rent to the tenant at ten per cent., payable at a near and certain date.  This would reduce the landlord’s reduction at once, of course, for the tenant, to ten per cent., but that was not to be disdained; and so the bargain would be struck.  If the money was repaid at the fixed date, it was not a bad thing for the usurer.  But it was almost never so repaid; and with repeated renewals the usurer, by his own showing, used to receive eventually twenty, fifty, and, in some cases, nearly a hundred per cent, for his loan.”

It is the opinion of this gentleman that, under the “Plan of Campaign,” a good deal of money-making is done in a quiet way by some of the “trustees,” who turn over at good interest, with the help of friendly financiers, the funds lodged with them, being held to account to the tenants only for the principal.  “Of course,” he said, “all this is doubtless at least as legitimate as any other part of the ‘Plan,’ and I daresay it all goes for ‘the good of the cause.’  But neither the tenants nor the landlords get much by it!”

CHAPTER XIII.

DUBLIN, Thursday, March 8.—­At eight o’clock this morning I left the Harcourt Street station for Inch, to take a look at the scene of the Coolgreany evictions of last summer.  These evictions came of the adoption of the Plan of Campaign, under the direction of Mr. Dillon, M.P., on the Wexford property of Mr. George Brooke of Dublin.  The agent of Mr. Brooke’s estate, Captain Hamilton, is the honorary director of the Property Defence Association, so that we have here obviously a grapple between the National League doing the work, consciously or unconsciously, of the agrarian revolutionists, and a combination of landed proprietors fighting for the rights of property as they understand them.