There is a severe pressure of usury, too, upon the farmers.

"If a farmer," said one resident to me, "wants to borrow a small sum of the Loan Fund Bank, he must have two securities--one of them a substantial man good for the debt.

These two indorsers must be 'treated' by the borrower whom they back; and he must pay them a weekly sum for the countenance they have given him, which not seldom amounts, before he gets through with the matter, to a hundred per cent, on the original loan." I am assured too that the consumption of spirits all through this region has greatly increased of late years.

"The official reports will show you," said one gentleman, "that the annual outlay upon whisky in Ireland equals the sum saved to the tenants by the reductions in rent." This is a proposition so remarkable that I simply record it for future verification, as having been made by a very quiet, cool, and methodical person, whose information on other points I have found to be correct.

He tells me too, as of his own knowledge, that in going over some financial matters with a small farmer in his neighbourhood, he ascertained, beyond a peradventure, that this farmer annually spent in whisky, for the use of his family, consisting of himself, his wife and three adult children, nearly, or quite, _seventy pounds a year_! "You won't believe this," he said to me; "and if you print the statement nobody else will believe it; but for all that it is the simple unexaggerated truth." Falstaff's reckoning at Dame Quickly's becomes a moderate score in comparison with this! I spent half an hour again in the muniment-room at Kilkenny Castle, where, in the Expense-Book of the second Duke of Ormond, I found a supper _menu_ worthy of record, as illustrating what people meant by "keeping open house" in the great families of the time of Queen Anne.[Note L.] Taking a train early in the afternoon, I came on here in time to dine last night with Mr.Rolleston of Delgany, an uncompromising Protestant "Home Ruler"-- as Protestant and as uncompromising as John Mitchel--whose recent pamphlet on "Boycotting" has deservedly attracted so much attention on both sides of the Irish Sea.
I was first led into a correspondence with Mr.Rolleston by a remarkable article of his published in the _Dublin University Review_ for February 1886, on "The Archbishop in Politics." In that article, Mr.Rolleston, while avowing himself to be robust enough to digest without much difficulty the _ex officio_ franchise conferred upon the Catholic clergy by Mr.Parnell to secure the acceptance of his candidates at Parliamentary conventions, made a very firm and fearless protest against the attempt of the Archbishops of Dublin and Cashel to "boycott" Catholic criticism of the National League and its methods, by declaring such criticism to be "a public insult" offered, not to the Archbishops of Cashel and Dublin personally, or as political supporters of the National League, but to the Archbishops as dignitaries of the Catholic Church, and to their Archiepiscopal office.