the better of me, either in bandying words
or yet in acts, so long as they were open and above-board, but it has
always been the way of sedition and conspiracy to hit below the belt.

CHAPTER XIX

MURDER, OUTRAGE AND CRIME

Once launched upon memories of those horrible perpetrations by so-called
Christians, which disgraced alike my native country and all Christendom
(because the criminals nominally worshipped the same God, and professed
reverence to Him), I could enumerate instances until I had filled a
volume.

You know how the Ghost told Hamlet that he could a tale unfold, whose
lightest word would harrow up his soul. Why, I could tell five score,
and still not have exhausted the roll of crime.

As my experience is mainly connected with Kerry, it is
characteristically Irish for me to start with an example from County
Cork. The outrage was on the Rathcole estate of Sir George Colthurst.
The rental was L1500, and the landlord had expended L10,000 on
improvements, so that it was not to be wondered that the labourers
should meet to celebrate their employer's marriage.

Nor to any one knowing Ireland was it surprising that the Land League
should have despatched one of their well-armed bands to fire on them for
so doing.

This was apparently a challenge to Kerry not to be outdone in barbarity
by Cork, her neighbour and rival.

Kerry was quite equal to current demands on her inhumanity.

A labourer of the M'Gillycuddys was visited by another Land League
detachment and had his ear, _a la_ Bulgaria, cut clean off to the bone,
because he worked on a farm from which a tenant had been evicted.

The next night a small Protestant farmer near Tralee found his best cow
tortured and killed because he had sold milk to the police.

On the same night a farmer's house was sacked because he had bought some
'boycotted' hay.

Still on the same night, at Millstreet, another Land League gang
attacked a house, one of the Land League police being killed, and one of
the Crown police wounded.

In fact, all law save Land League law was for a time at an end in
Munster.

At one Kerry Assize, a criminal caught by four policemen in the very act
of breaking into a house, was acquitted, and at the Cork Assize the
Crown Prosecutor, after half a dozen acquittals, announced he would not
continue the farce of putting criminals on their trial.

I mentioned boycotting just now, but I am tempted to pause, because a
new generation tha