“No,” said my guide. “Perhaps half a dozen or so within the year.[3] They used to be much more numerous, but somehow they seem to go out of fashion under the sway of the League. But there are still other ways of annoying the enemy; fires are very frequent, so are blows, personal injuries, and even murder, threatening letters, and, above all, verbal intimidation.” Such proceedings, I understand, are altogether disowned by the chiefs of the League, who only patronise _boycotting_. Let a farmer, small or great, decline to enter the organisation, or check it by paying his rent to the landlord without the reduction agreed to by the tenantry, or take the succession of an evicted tenant on his holding, or commit any other serious offence against the law of land war, he is at once boycotted. That is to say, he will no longer be able to sell his goods, to buy the necessaries of life, to have his horses shod, his corn milled, or even to exchange one word with a living soul, within a circuit of fifteen to twenty miles round his house. His servants are tampered with and induced to leave him, his tradespeople are made to shut their door in his face, his neighbours compelled to cut him. It is a kind of excommunication, social, political and commercial; an interdict sometimes aggravated with direct vexations. People come and play football on his oat fields, his potatoes are rooted out, his fish or cattle poisoned, his game destroyed. “But supposing that instead of bearing meekly such indignities, he shows a bold front, shoulders his gun and keeps watch?” “Then his business is settled. Some day or other, he will receive a bullet in his arm, if not in his head.” * * * * * It will not perhaps be unnecessary to explain here the origin of that word _boycott_, so frequently used during the late few years. Everybody knows that on the British side of the Channel, but the French reader is not bound to remember it so exactly. In September, 1881, at a mass meeting held in Clare County, Mr. Parnell almost without being aware of the importance of his words, advised his friends, to exclude from the pale of social life whoever should eject a tenant for reason of an unpaid rent, or take the succession of the evicted farmer. The first application of that new penalty fell upon a certain Captain Boycott, a retired officer, who had applied himself to agriculture. Having had occasion to evict an obdurate defaulter, he saw himself within a few days forsaken by his servants, tabooed by his neighbours, reduced to dig out his own potatoes, and generally to become his own valet.