My experience while in England had been that few people I met really appreciated what boycotting was like, so how are my readers of twenty years afterwards to do so?  Yet when I went back to Ireland, it seemed to me even more cruel than when I had grown comparatively accustomed by sheer proximity to it.

Mr. Parnell had himself given the order in a public speech:—­

’Shun the man who bids for a farm from which a tenant has been evicted, shun him in the street, in the shop, in the marketplace, even in the place of worship, as if he were a leper of old.’

This was done with the thoroughness which characterises Irishmen when back-sliding into unimaginable cruelties.  Should a boycotted man enter chapel, the whole congregation rose as with one accord and left him alone in the building.  Considering the sensitive and pious disposition of the average Irishman, such ostracism was even more poignant than it would be to an Englishman.

Only two families in Kerry, possibly in Munster, at Christmas 1885, had the courage to resist the National League police, commonly called moonlighters.  These two were the Curtins and the Doyles.  The Curtins had to be under constant police protection, were insulted wherever they went, and their murdered father was openly called ‘the murderer.’  As for the Doyles, the Board of Guardians was urged to harass his unfortunate children, who were both deaf and dumb.

The same Board of Guardians was most lavish in its relief to any man evicted for declining to pay his rent.  In one case they gave a man fifteen shillings a week—­or treble the ordinary out-of-door relief—­for over six years.

Sir James Stephen, a man of acute discriminations, who has done more justice to the Irish problem than any one else, wrote:—­

’The great difficulty the Land League and the National League have had to contend with is that of hindering the neighbouring farmers, peasants, and labourers from frustrating the strike against rent by taking up vacant farms, however they came to be vacant.  Boycotting never succeeded unless crime was at its back.  The Crimes Act cut the ground from under the feet of the boycotters, not so much by its direct prohibitions of the practice as by making it unsafe to commit outrages in enforcing the law of the League.  The Land League and the National League were nothing else but screens for secret societies whose work was to enforce the League decrees by outrage and murder.’

Whenever the ‘History of Modern Ireland’ comes to be written, that glowing outburst of truth ought to be quoted.

There were some evictions carried out at Farranfore on the estate of Lord Kenmare, by the sub-sheriff, Mr. Harnett, and a force of military and police numbering about one hundred and thirty.

During the eviction of one Daly, horns were blown and the chapel bell set ringing.  These appeals drew about three thousand people to the place, who groaned and threw some stones, besides growing so menacing that the Riot Act had to be read, upon which the whole crowd moved off.