It was for this moment it had clung to the land with such fidelity. During the first forty years of the century rents were increased by thirty, forty, and in some cases fifty per cent. On an average it took a man 250 days of the year to clear his rent; and this meant that the people could only live on the dregs of the land and on sorrel and cattle-blood. Yet still they clung. When Pestilence and Starvation stalked through the land, and the young men and girls had to fly over-seas, the families still clung to their holdings. Those young men and girls lived in penury in America in order that their earnings should be sent home to maintain the grip on the land. The Nation was holding its old property, and meant to win it back. They arose in war and shot the usurpers on their ancient property. And then at the height of that war they suddenly, in a new awakening of memory, put their old law into operation--the very law by which the land had been ensured to them as a freeman’s possession. “The body of the law which all Ireland enacted none dared to transgress; and he that perchance did so was outlawed from the men of Ireland.” The landlord transgressed that law, so the people outlawed him. Boycotting according to the foreign State-idea was lawlessness, yet it was truly the assertion of the law of one State against the usurpation of another State. Not being the enactment of its own central authority it was naturally subject to local abuse; yet it was not lawlessness but the revival of a legal procedure. And finally the land was won back, though the people were compelled to pay for the property that had been robbed from them. So potent a thing was the old expectation.