How then was this gigantic strike to be carried on without violence or threatening life or limb? Quite easily was the reply--by extending the process of "Boycotting." This is, it seems, the great constitutional weapon on which neither horse, foot, nor artillery can be brought to bear. Those who will not join the _Jacquerie_, and aid and abet those Irish analogues of Jacques Bonhomme, Mike and Thady and Tim, in their resistance to "landlordism" shall be "Boycotted"; and all those who refuse to join in "Boycotting" an offender shall be treated in the same way.
Already the stoutest hearted are yielding on every side to the dread of being "Boycotted," a doom which signifies simply that the victim must surrender or leave the country. It means that nobody will buy or sell with any member of the family which is declared "taboo"; that the farmer may drive his cattle and pigs to market, but will not find a purchaser; that he may reap his grain and pull his potatoes, but that not a soul in the country will buy them for fear of being "Boycotted" himself. It means that the baker will refuse him bread, and the butcher meat; that no draper who knows his wife by sight will sell her as much as a ribbon; that not a creature will buy her butter and eggs, chickens and turkeys, geese and ducks; that she will be unable to buy any article of food or luxury for her children, and that they will be "sent to Coventry" at school.
There is not an atom of exaggeration in anything here stated. It is not a fancy picture, but as genuine as that of Mr. Boycott himself; and there is no doubt that the taste for "Boycotting" is spreading rapidly, as my informant, who is heartily in favour of it, declares it is "clean within any law that could be made, let alone carried out." It is impossible to compel any community to have dealings with a person whom they dislike, and the anti-landlord party are determined to carry their point without, as appears on the notices served on farmers, "hurting one hair of their heads." "Isolation" has, in fact, been added to the number of the arts which soften manners and forbid them to be savage. It is the sprig of shillelagh in a velvet sheath.
The present condition of Mr. W. Bence Jones, of Lisselan, whom I called upon to-day, illustrates most vividly the advance made in the art of "Boycotting" since its invention. Early attempts in any artistic direction are apt to be crude, and when "Boycotting" was first practised at Lough Mask it put on the guise of a general strike of the country side against an individual, but its effect was purely local. Since that time great progress has been made in shaping and finishing what one of my informants defined as "a strictly constitutional weapon." At this moment the arm of the skilful "Boycotter" is long. It can stop the sale of the original victim's potatoes in a northern town; it can keep Mr. Stacpoole from getting rid of his horses in Limerick; and can actually prevent Mr. Bence Jones from sending his cattle from Cork to England. The latter gentleman is isolated on his estate at Lisselan, a place near Ballinascarthy, between Bandon and Clonakilty, in this county, but his isolation has not yet gone, in some respects, to the same brutal length as that of Mr. Boycott. He is still permitted to receive and to despatch his letters; and car-drivers have, perhaps by some oversight of the "Boycotters," not yet been warned to avoid his house as if it were a lazaretto, and to refuse to carry his visitors within miles of his door. Perhaps he is considered by the mysterious persons who alone exercise authority in Ireland just now as only a "tyrant" of the second or third degree, and not as a first-class malefactor.