Here are some lines from the ‘Irish Tenant’s Song’ which express a good deal of the popular emotion:—­

Oh, Parnell, dear, and did you hear the news that’s going round?  The landlords are forbid by law to live on Irish ground.  No more their rent-days they may keep, nor agents harsh distrain, The widow need no longer weep, for over is their reign.  I met with mighty Gladstone, and he took me by the hand, And he said, ’Hurrah for Ireland! ’tis now the happy land.  ’Tis a most delightful country that I for you have made—­You may shoot the landlord through the head who asks that rent be paid.’  We care not for the agent, nor do we care for those Who come upon us to distrain—­we pay them back in blows.  And when hopeless, helpless, ruined, these landlords vile shall roam, We’ll hunt and hound them from the roofs they’ve held so long as home.

I don’t say that was sung in Castleisland, but it might have been the local hymn and verbal companion to the brutal misdeeds of the benighted inhabitants.

As if matters were not bad enough, that Apostle of outrage Mr. Michael Davitt came to Castleisland on February 21, 1886, and in a pestilential speech, inciting to crime, he showed that, at all events, he appreciated that for sheer blackness and turpitude Kerry was bad to beat.  He said:—­

’For some time past Kerry has attracted more attention for the occurrences which have been taking place here, than the whole remainder of Ireland put together.  I am not without hope that henceforth, until the battle with landlordism and Dublin Castle is triumphantly over, the people of Kerry will be towers of strength to the national cause.  The hope of Irish landlordism is now centred in Kerry.  Elsewhere it has none, it is a social rinderpest, since the National League was started 1600 families have been turned out in this one county.’

Captain M’Calmont in the House of Commons, three weeks afterwards, called attention to Mr. Baron Dowse’s address to the Grand Jury of the County of Kerry in which he stated:—­

’That this county is in a very much worse state than it has been for years:  that there are no less than three hundred offences specially reported to the constabulary since the Assizes of 1885, consisting of two cases of murder, eighteen cases of letters threatening to murder, thirty-nine cases of cattle, horse, and sheep stealing, eleven cases of arson, eighteen cases of maiming cattle, fifty-two cases of seizing arms, seventy-four cases of sending threatening letters, and twenty-four cases of intimidation.’

You will observe that this is the same picture from two different points of view.

Almost the worst case in which I was personally interested, was that of the Cruickshank family.

The father, an industrious, respectable, elderly Scotsman, supported his family at Inch by the proceeds of a rabbit-warren which he rented.  He had no farm, and therefore might expect to live in peace, even in Kerry, in those times; but, as he was a Scotch Protestant, and had arms, he was a marked man.