roperty in Galway the "Plan of
Campaign" has been introduced, my informant says, because Lord
Clanricarde happens to be personally unpopular. "Go down to Portumna and
Woodford," he said, "and look into the matter for yourself. You will
find that the rents on the Clanricarde estates are in the main
exceptionally fair, and even low. The present Marquis has almost never
visited Ireland, I believe, and he is not much known even in London.
People who dislike him for one reason or another readily believe
anything that is said to his disadvantage as a landlord. Most people who
don't like the cut of Dr. Fell's whiskers, or the way in which he takes
soup, are quite disposed to listen to you if you tell them he beats his
wife or plays cards too well. The campaigners are shrewd fellows, and
they know this, so they start the 'Plan of Campaign' on the Portumna
properties, and get a lot of English windbags to come there and hobnob
with some of the most mischievous and pestilent parish priests in all
Ireland--and then you have the dreadful story of the 'evictions,' and
all the rest of it. Lord Clanricarde, or his agent, or both of them,
getting out of temper, will sit down and do some hasty or crabbed or
injudicious thing, or write a provoking letter, and forthwith it is
enough to say 'Clanricarde,' and all common sense goes out of the
question, to the great damage, not so much of Lord Clanricarde--for he
lives in London, and is a rich man, and, I suppose, don't mind the
row--but of landlords all over Ireland, and therefore, in the long-run,
of the tenants of Ireland as well."

At Luggacurren, this gentleman thinks, the League is beaten. There are
eighty-two tenants there, evicted and living dismally in what is called
the Land League village, a set of huts erected near the roadside, while
their farms are carried on for the owner by the Land Corporation. As
they were most of them unwilling to accept the Plan, and were
intimidated into it for the benefit of the League, and of the two chief
tenants, Mr. Dunn and Mr. Kilbride, men of substance who had squandered
their resources, the majority of the evicted are sore and angry.

"At first each man was allowed L3 a month by the League for himself and
his family. But they found that Mr. Kilbride, who has been put into
Parliament by Mr. Parnell for Kerry, a county with which he has no more
to do than I have with the Isle of Skye, was getting L5 a week, and so
they revolted, and threatened to