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 £1500, and the landlord had expended £10,000 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, à 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.