The late earl was very popular with his tenants, and so liberal and lenient was he, according to the gossip, that they got into bad habits, and when the present earl came into the property in 1874 he pulled them up very sharply and demanded a prompt and full payment of all their obligations. Being unaccustomed to such stern measures, they were resentful, and a quarrel began which has lasted until now, and Clanricarde, convinced that he has right and justice on his side, has used the mailed hand. There have been more trouble and disturbance upon his estates than upon any other in Ireland. Every one of his tenants has been evicted, and sometimes a succession of them, and their farms have been let to what are called "planters,"--a term used in Ireland to describe families imported from a distance and planted upon land which no person in the neighborhood will rent because the previous tenant has been evicted from it. Every man on the Clanricarde estates is a "planter." After the passage of the act of 1907 the estates commissioners requested him to sell his entire holding under the act of 1903, but he not only rejected the proposition, but has declined even to discuss the subject, and has maintained that uncompromising attitude from the beginning, an embittered, relentless, vindictive old man. [Illustration: PORTUMNA CASTLE, COUNTY GALWAY; THE SEAT OF THE EARL OF CLANRICARDE] When the commission undertook to apply the compulsory clause of the Evicted Tenants Act and published the notice in the _Dublin Gazette_, the earl filed a protest. Mr. Justice Wiley of the Lower Court sustained the commission, but the Court of Appeals, composed of twelve judges, unanimously reversed the decision and decided that the estates commission has no power to forcibly dispossess any _bona fide_ "planter" from land already under lease.