“The people are more afraid of boycotting, which depends for its success on the probability of outrage, than they are of the judgments of the Courts of Justice.  The unwritten law in some districts is supreme.  We deem it right to call attention to the terrible ordeal that a boycotted person has to undergo, which was by several witnesses graphically described during the progress of our enquiry.  The existence of a boycotted person becomes a burden to him, as none in town or village are allowed, under a similar penalty to themselves, to supply him or his family with the necessaries of life.  He is not allowed to dispose of the produce of his farm.  Instances have been brought before us in which his attendance at divine service was prohibited, in which his cattle have been, some killed, some barbarously mutilated; in which all his servants and labourers were ordered and obliged to leave him; in which the most ordinary necessaries of life and even medical comforts, had to be procured from long distances; in which no one would attend the funeral, or dig a grave for, a member of a boycotted person’s family; and in which his children have been forced to discontinue attendance at the National School of the district.”

This was the ordinary form of Government as conducted by the Nationalists; and any attempt to interfere with it and to enforce the milder laws of England, is now denounced as “coercion.”

In 1881 Gladstone carried another and a more far-reaching Land Act.  To put it shortly, it may be said that all agricultural land (except that held by leaseholders, who were brought in under the Act of 1887) was handed over to the occupiers for ever (with free power of sale), subject only to the payment of rent—­the rent not being that which the tenants had agreed to pay, but that which a Land Court decided to Be a “fair rent.”  This was to last for fifteen years, at the end of which time the tenant might again claim to have a fair rent fixed, and so ad infinitum.  The Land Court in most cases cut down the rent by about 20 or 25 per cent.; and at the end of fifteen years did the same again.  As tithes (which had been secularized but not abolished), mortgages and family charges remained unchanged, the result was that a large proportion of landlords were absolutely ruined; in very many cases those who appear as owners now have no beneficial interest in their estates.

In examining the Act calmly, one must observe in the first place that it was a wholesale confiscation of property.  Not of course one that involved the cruelty of confiscations of previous ages, but a confiscation all the same.  For if A. bought a farm in the Incumbered Estates Court, with a Parliamentary title, and let it to B. for twenty years at a rent of L100; and the Act gave B. the right of occupying it for ever subject to the payment of L50 a year, and selling it for any price he liked, that can only mean the transfer of property from A. to B. Secondly, the Act encouraged