This is an extract from his speech at Ardfert:—­

’Sam Hussey is a vulture with a broken beak, and he laid his voracious talons on the consciences of the voters. (Boos.) The ugly scowl of Sam Hussey came down upon them.  He wanted to try the influence of his dark nature on the poor people. (Groans).  Where was the legitimate influence of such a man?  Was it in the white terror he diffused?  Was it not the espionage, the network of spies with which he surrounded his lands?  He denied that a man who managed property had for that reason a shadow of a shade of influence to justify him in asking a tenant for his vote.  What had they to thank him for?’

A voice:  ‘Rack rents.’

’They knew the man from his boyhood, from his gossoonhood.  He knew him when he began with a collop of sheep as his property in the world.  (Laughter.) Long before he got God’s mark on him.  It was not the man’s fault but his misfortune that he got no education. (Laughter.) He had in that parish schoolmasters who could teach him grammar for the next ten years.  The man was in fact a Uriah Heep among Kerry landlords.  (Cheers.)’

The result of this and other incentives to irritability was that the voters for Mr. Dease had to be escorted by troops and constabulary.

The sporting proclivities had already been shown over a race.  In the County Club at Tralee there was an altercation between Mr. Sandes and a leading ‘Deasite’ as to the rival merits of a bay mare belonging to one and a chestnut horse owned by the other.

Quoth Mr. Sandes:—­

’I’ll run you a two mile steeplechase for a hundred guineas if you like, and I’ll call my horse Home Rule—­do you call yours Deasite; each to ride his own horse.’

No Kerry man could refuse such a challenge, and the race excited more interest than the election.

Mr. Sandes won, leaving ‘Deasite’ nowhere, and this helped Mr. Blennerhasset to head the poll.

More than one man is asserted to have voted for:—­’Him you know that me landlord wants me to vote for.’

But I should say several dozen voted for:—­

‘Him you know that the priest, God bless him, tells me to vote for.’

The libel over which the action arose was alleged to have been published in the Cork Examiner, and the words complained of were pretty sturdy.

The jury returned a verdict of one farthing for the plaintiff priest, and I do not think he derived as much advertisement out of it as Miss Marie Corelli obtained from a similar coin of the realm.

Of course all this should have shown me that I had in my own interests better keep clear of Kerry politics, but after I had bought the Harenc estate, I stood for Tralee as a Tory against The O’Donoghue, who was a Nationalist.  I never supposed I was going to get in, but I really had a capital run for the Parliamentary Handicap, though I was weighted by political convictions and penalised by my creed.  The priests made a most active set against me.  There were only fifty Protestants on the register, and yet I managed to get one hundred and thirty votes, for which suffrages some eighty honest men must have been well worrited in the confessional.