Page:The Gaelic State in the Past & Future.djvu/61

 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.

So deep a national stirring was not without its effects far and wide, especially as it was less an event in itself than part of a greater whole. The century was continually shaken by a series of revolutions, the pulsations of its reawakening life, each of which struck its roots down deeper into the past, and