“It is quite true that we have no security here for persons or property,” a doctor of the town said to me in the evening. “The outrages were at first exclusively directed against the landlords, rightly or wrongly accused of injustice and harshness in their dealings with their tenants; but for the last two or three years the field of nocturnal aggression has enlarged greatly—a shot now serves to settle any personal quarrel and even trade accounts. In the beginning the jury at least made a distinction between the different motives that actuated the accused. Now they always acquit them, _because they no longer dare to find them guilty_.... What will you have?... Jurymen are but men. They prefer sending a ruffian at large to paying with their life a too subtle distinction between crimes of an agrarian character and those of another sort. A lump of lead is the most irresistible of arguments. One may assert that presently law has lost all influence in Kerry. It is rapine that reigns, hardly tempered by the decrees of the National League, which of course means only legitimate resistance to the landlords, and by the fund of righteousness possessed at heart by the nation. But let things go on thus only for two years more, we shall have gone back to the savage state.” “Some people tell me, however, that raiding for money is never seen in this part of Ireland.” “Raiding for money never seen! I would rather say it is the latest development of moonlighting. Any one who covets a piece of his neighbour’s land, who wishes to influence his vote for a board of guardians, who is animated by any motive of vulgar greed or spite, has only to set the Moonlighters in motion. The machinery is at hand.” “Could you really give me a few recent instances of moonlighting for money?” “Of course I could. There is one Daniel Moynihan, at Freemount, near Rathmore: in October, 1886, a party of six men with blackened faces entered his house at night, and breaking open a box, carried away all his money. In January, 1887, at Ballinillane, three men armed with guns entered Daniel Lyne’s house and asked for money, threatening to shoot him if he refused; they took away £6. At Faha, in March, 1887, a party of six armed men visited the house of Mr. E. Morrogh Bernard; they demanded money, and got what was in the house.”[2] “You don’t say the League has anything to do with such obvious cases of non-political moonlighting, do you? It is a well-known fact that the organization discountenances moonlighting as well as all other violent practices.” “It does in a manner, but at the same time, by forming in each district a kind of police of the League, an executive body ready for action, it singles out to malignant persons men who may be ready for a private job.”