and much more effective. Orders were issued that tenants should, in every part of Ireland, repudiate the rents they had agreed to pay, and should pay only such sums as had been assessed on land by a valuation made by the State for rates, a standard long acknowledged to be much too low; every landlord who should reject these terms was to incur the vengeance of the League. By these means Parnell expected, and not without reason, that a great combination for the forcible reduction of rent would be formed, and that numbers of farmers would flock in to the League, but he knew that his proposal was simply a defiance of the law, and that it would be resisted by many of the landed gentry; he hit on an expedient through which he believed he would attain his end. Should any landlord refuse to accept the sum offered instead of the proper rent, and should proceed to dispossess the defaulting tenant--and practically he could have no other remedy--the evicted farm was to be left derelict; it was to be smitten, as it were, by the interdict of the League; and any wretch who should dare to take it was to be banned by the whole neighbourhood; he and his, and those who dealt with him, 'were to be shunned as lepers,' and 'treated as traitors to the cause.'[71] In this way, the crime of 'boycotting,' as it has ever since been called--its origin may be traced to the great Tithe War in Ireland--was made part of 'the unwritten law' of the League; and Parnell professed, whether sincerely or not, that through this device the League would baffle the law, and the landlords, as a class, as unhappily it did, in too many instances. Having thus armed the conspiracy with increased power, he cynically began to deprecate crimes of violence: the device of 'boycotting' was a more excellent way; it would before long 'bring landlords to their knees,' and would ultimately 'plant the tenant in his farm to be held at a nominal rent,' should he only be true to the League. At the same time the astute plotter found other means to extend his authority and that of the conspiracy he ruled. He appealed to the elective Local Boards in each county, composed for the most part of tenant farmers, to join the League, and to carry out his policy; and continuously but steadily he brought the force of the League to bear upon the administration of the law, by the intimidation of juries, magistrates, and even judicial persons.