-different but equally beautiful and striking, and this
Catholic gentleman cited several cases which had fallen within his own
knowledge of priests who begin to feel their moral control of the people
slipping away from them through the operation of the "Plan of Campaign."
I told him what I had heard in regard to one such priest from my
ecclesiastical friend in Cork. "It does not surprise me at all," he
said, "and, indeed, I not very long ago read precisely such another
letter from a priest in a somewhat similar position. I read it with pain
and shame as a Catholic," he continued, "for it was simply a complete
admission that the priest, although entirely convinced that his
parishioners were making most unfair demands upon their landlord to whom
the letter was addressed, felt himself entirely powerless to bring them
to a sense of their misconduct." "Had this priest given in his adhesion
to the Plan of Campaign?" I asked. "Yes," was the reply, "and it was
this fact which had broken his hold on the people when he tried to bring
them to abandon their attitude under the Plan. His letter was really
nothing more nor less than an appeal to the landlord, and that landlord
a Protestant, to help him to get out of the hole into which he had put
himself."

Of the tenants and their relation to the village despots who administer
the Plan of Campaign, this gentleman had many stories also to tell of
the same tenor with all that I have hitherto heard on this subject.
Everywhere it is the same thing. The well-to-do and well-disposed
tenants are coerced by the thriftless and shiftless. "I have the
agencies of several properties," he said, "and in some of the best parts
of Ireland. I have had little or no trouble on any of them, for I have
one uniform method. I treat every tenant as if he were the only man I
had to deal with, study his personal ways and character, humour him, and
get him on my side against himself. You can always do this with an
Irishman if you will take the trouble to do it. Within the past years I
have had tenants come and tell me they were in fear the Plan of Campaign
would be brought upon them, just as if it were a kind of potato disease,
and beg me to agree to take the rent from them in that case, and just
not discover on them that they had paid it before it was due!"

This gentleman is a pessimist as to the future. "I am a youngish man
still," he said, "and a single man, and I am glad of it. I don't believe
the Englis