An article appeared shortly afterwards in a League newspaper, loudly boasting of the great victory won by Mr. Dillon, M.P., for the starving and poverty-stricken tenants. Two of these tenants (brothers) were under a yearly rent of £7, 10s. They declared they could only pay £3, 15s., or a half-year's rent, and this only if they got an abatement of 15s. Yet these same tenants were then paying Mr. Richardson £50 a year for a grass farm, and about £12 for meadows, as well as £30 a year more for a grass farm to an adjoining landlord. Another tenant who held a farm at £13, 5s. a year declared he could only pay £6, 12s. 6d., or a half-year's rent, if he got an abatement of £1, 6s. 6d. A very short time before, this tenant had taken a grass farm from an adjoining landlord, and he was so anxious to get it that he showed the landlord a bundle of large notes, amounting to rather more than £300 sterling, in order to prove his solvency! The same tenant has since written a letter to Mr. Richardson offering £50 a year for a grass farm! All these campaigners, Mr. Richardson says, "with one noble exception, the wife of a tenant who was ill, declined to pay a penny of rent beyond November 1st, 1886," stating that they were "absolutely unable" to do more. So they all left the May 1887 rent unpaid, and the hanging gale to November 1887, which, however, they were not even asked to pay. The morning after the settlement many of the tenants who, when they were all present in a body on the previous evening, had declared their "inability" to pay the half-year's rent due down to May 1887, individually came to Mr. Richardson unasked, and paid it, some saying they had "borrowed the money that night," but others frankly declaring that they dared not break the rule publicly, having been ordered by the League only to pay to November 1886, for fear of the consequences. These would have been injury to their cattle, or the burning of their hay, or possibly murder. Of the country about Kilkenny, I am told, as of the country about Carlow, that nearly or quite seventy per cent, of the labourers are dependent upon the landlords from November to May for such employment as they get. The shopkeepers, too, are in a bad way, being in many cases reduced to the condition of mere agents of the great wholesale houses elsewhere, and kept going by these houses mainly in the hope of recovering old debts. 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."