ctive as the boycott. A flourishing business finds its trade gone
overnight. Leading customers withdraw their patronage at the union's
threat. The alert picket is the harbinger of ruin, and the union black
list is as fraught with threat as the black hand.

* In 1880, Lord Erne, an absentee Irish landlord, sent Captain Boycott
to Connemara to subdue his irate tenants. The people of the region
refused to have any intercourse whatever with the agent or his family.
And social and business ostracism has since been known as the boycott.

The New York Bureau of Statistics of Labor has shown that during the
period of eight years between 1885 and 1892 there were 1352 boycotts in
New York State alone. A sort of terrorism spread among the tradespeople
of the cities. But the unions went too far. Instances of gross
unfairness aroused public sympathy against the boycotters. In New York
City, for instance, a Mrs. Grey operated a small bakery with nonunion
help. Upon her refusal to unionize her shop at the command of the
walking delegate, her customers were sent the usual boycott notice,
and pickets were posted. Her delivery wagons were followed, and her
customers were threatened. Grocers selling her bread were systematically
boycotted. All this persecution merely aroused public sympathy for Mrs.
Grey, and she found her bread becoming immensely popular. The boycotters
then demanded $2500 for paying their boycott expenses. When news of
this attempt at extortion was made public, it heightened the tide of
sympathy, the courts took up the matter, and the boycott failed. The New
York Boycotter, a journal devoted to this form of coercion, declared:
"In boycotting we believe it to be legitimate to strike a man
financially, socially, or politically. We believe in hitting him where
it will hurt the most; we believe in remorselessly crowding him to the
wall; but when he is down, instead of striking him, we would lift him up
and stand him once more on his feet." When the boycott thus enlisted
the aid of blackmail, it was doomed in the public esteem. Boycott
indictments multiplied, and in one year in New York City alone, over
one hundred leaders of such attempts at coercion were sentenced to
imprisonment.

The boycott, however, was not laid aside as a necessary weapon of
organized labor because it had been abused by corrupt or overzealous
unionists, nor because it had been declared illegal by the courts.
All the resources of the more conser