One of two things is clear: either these combinations are voluntary and "isolated," and intended, as Mr.Parnell asserts, to secure such a reduction of rents as will enable the tenants, and each of them, to live peacefully and comfortably at home, and in that case any member of the combination who finds that he can attain his object better by leaving it has an absolute right to do this, and to demand the return of his money; or they are part of a system imposed upon the tenants by a moral coercion inconsistent with the most elementary ideas of private right and personal freedom.

This makes the importance of Mr.Dillon's speech, that by his denunciation of any member who wishes to withdraw from this "voluntary" combination as a "traitor," and by his order to "close upon the money" of any such member, "and use it for the organisation," he brands the "organisation" as a subterranean despotism of a very cheap and nasty kind.

The Government which tolerates the creation of such a Houndsditch tyranny as this within its dominions richly deserves to be overthrown.

As for the people who submit themselves to it, I do not wonder that in his more lucid moments a Catholic priest like Father Quilter feels himself moved to denounce them as "poor slaves." Of course with a benevolent neutral like myself, the question always recurs, Who trained them to submit to this sort of thing?
But I really am at a loss to see why a parcel of conspirators should be encouraged in the nineteenth century to bully Irish farmers out of their manhood and their money, because in the seventeenth century it pleased the stupid rulers of England, as the great Duke of Ormond indignantly said, to "put so general a discountenance upon the improvement of Ireland, as if it were resolved that to keep it low is to keep it safe." On going back to the little drawing-room after dinner we found Mrs.
Tener among her flowers, busy with some literary work.

It is not a gay life here, she admits, her nearest visiting acquaintance living some seven or eight miles away--but she takes long walks with a couple of stalwart dogs in her company, and has little fear of being molested.
"The tenants are in more danger," she thinks, "than the landlords or the agents"-- nor do I see any reason to doubt this, remembering the Connells whom I saw at Edenvale, and the story of the "boycotted" Fitzmaurice brutally murdered in the presence of his daughter at Lixnaw on the 31st of January, as if by way of welcome to Lord Ripon and Mr.Morley on their arrival at Dublin.
PORTUMNA, _Feb.