ess, or intercourse, nor was any one else permitted to relieve his
isolation, or do him or his family any service, or supply him with any
necessity of life. The Orangemen of Ulster organized and went armed to
his relief, and under the protection of a small band of soldiers and
police, his harvests were gathered in, and his produce conveyed to the
nearest available market. Boycott went to England for a short time, and
on his return to Lough Mask at once extricated himself from his painful
and perilous position by giving up his agency. His unexpected surrender,
strange to tell, brought about a complete revulsion of feeling among the
dwellers of that wild and lovely district. He now became as popular as
he had before been obnoxious. In the course of a speech delivered at a
mass meeting of from fifteen to twenty thousand men at Waterford, in
September, 1883, Michael Davitt said, "It was better for all concerned
that the truth should be plainly and bluntly told, in order that English
quack statesmen might be saved the trouble of proposing half measures to
satisfy the Irish people.... Let the landlords of Ireland resign their
unpopular positions, follow the example of Captain Boycott, and nobody
would molest them, but if they did not, they would be grievously
surprised by and by, for they would make the discovery which Captain
Boycott had made, that the English government would find that it did not
pay from an Imperial point of view to support a worse than useless
class against the Irish nation. The 'lifeboat for the landlords,' as
Lord Derby had once called the Land Act (1881), rescued them from the
rocks upon which they were hurled by the waves of the Land League, but
they had not reached the shores of safety yet. There were other breakers
ahead that would do more damage to their rotten system than the storm of
the Land League. When the laborers and the artisans of Ireland or of
England and Scotland were enfranchised, was it to be supposed that the
educated millions of industry would allow the national patrimony--the
land--to be any longer the property of a useless class? In the language
of scripture, the landlords would be asked to give an account of their
stewardship, for they could be no longer stewards."

While, however, the Land Leaguers were jubilant at the success of their
movement, the government were preparing to take strenuous measures for
its suppression. Its leaders, Mr. Parnell, Mr. Dillon, Mr. T. D.
Sullivan, M