bolt if their subsidy was not raised to
L4 a month."

"And this they get now? Out of what funds?"

"Out of the League funds, or, in other words, out of their own and other
people's money, foolishly put by the tenants into the keeping of the
League to 'protect' it! They give it the kind of 'protection' that
Oliver gave the liberties of England: once they get hold of it, they
never let go!"

I submitted that at Gweedore Father M'Fadden had paid over to Captain
Hill the funds confided to him.

"No doubt; but there the landlord gave in, and the more fool he!"

With another guest I had an interesting conversation about the Ulster
tenant-right, which got itself more or less enacted into British law
only in 1870, and of which Mr. Froude tells me he sought in vain to
discover the definite origin. "The best lawyers in Ireland" could give
him no light on this point. He could only find that it did not exist
apparently in 1770, but did exist apparently twenty years later. The
gentleman with whom I talked to-night tells me that the custom of Ulster
was really once general throughout Ireland, and is called the "Ulster"
custom, only because it survived there after disappearing elsewhere.
There is a tradition too, he says, in Ulster that the recognition of
this tenant-right as a binding custom there is really due to Lord
Castlereagh. It would be a curious thing, could this be verified, to
find Lord Castlereagh, whose name has been execrated in Ireland for
fourscore years, recommending and securing a century ago that
recognition of the interest of the Irish tenant in his holding, which,
in our time, Mr. Gladstone, just now the object of Irish adulation, was,
with much difficulty and reluctance, brought to accord in the
Compensation for Disturbances clause of his Act of 1870!

Of this clause, too, I am told to-night that the scale of compensation
fixed for the awards of the Court in the third section of it was devised
(though Mr. Gladstone did not know this) by an Irish member in the
interest of the "strong farmers," who wish to root out the small
farmers. There is an apparent confirmation of this story in the fact
that under this section the small farmers, under L10, may be awarded
against the landlord seven years' rent as compensation for disturbance,
while the number of years to be accounted for in the award diminishes as
the rental increases, a discrimination not unlikely to strengthen the
preference of the landlords for the l