four thousand four hundred and thirty-nine cases, nearly two thousand more than those of the preceding year.[72] In the spring and summer of 1881, the power of the League was at its height; in its organisation and working it bore a strong resemblance to the Jacobin societies of the Revolution in France. It was directed by a council from a central office in Dublin; its orders were sent thence to the bodies connected with it; these, scattered over many parts of the country, enforced its decrees through 'boycotting' crime, and terror. 'Obnoxious' persons, landlords, agents, 'land-grabbers,' and tenants who had paid their rents, were denounced and exposed to the League's vengeance; officers of the law and of justice were especially banned; even those thought to be 'luke-warm' in the cause were declared 'suspected.' In some districts the regular government was practically superseded by the government of the league, described by Mr. Gladstone as 'a scheme of anarchic oppression;' in these a Reign of Terror was really supreme. It will never be known to what extent the League made use of Whiteboyism and its secret conclaves in order to carry out its purposes; the central body, controlled by Parnell, probably did not, but the affiliated bodies certainly did; it is impossible to account otherwise for the enormous increase of agrarian crime; the branches of the League, it is generally supposed, overshadowed, so to speak, the Whiteboy societies; these were active agents in the atrocious deeds that were done. It is scarcely necessary to refer to what the condition of social life was wherever the influence of the League was great; despair settled on the hearts of thousands, who felt themselves exposed to unseen perils, and existed, as it were, in an atmosphere of crime; and it must be borne in mind that for one member of the better class, fifty probably of the humbler, who had transgressed the law of the League, were kept in a state of moral dread and torture. By this time the Fenian League in the United States, formed by Parnell, but ruled by the Clan na Gael, had completely joined hands with the League at home; its emissaries were found in many parts of Ireland; its organ, the _Irish World_, 'spread what it called the light,' the teaching of treason, murder, and dynamite; and it supplied the parent League with, probably, nine-tenths of its funds, for it is a significant fact, deserving special notice, that the contributions of the peasantry to the League were, from first to last, small. Large parts of Ireland were thus in a deplorable state; but it is a complete mistake to suppose, as has been asserted, that the authority of the League was general throughout the whole island. Protestant Ulster, with a true instinct of what the conspiracy was, a movement against British rule in Ireland, kept aloof from the League, in angry contempt; and though its influence was more widely diffused, it was confined, I have said, to comparatively few