to the leadership of Mr. Davitt.  But no choice was really left him, and there is reason to believe that a decision was made easier to him by a then inchoate undertaking that he should be personally protected against the financial consequences to himself of the new departure, by a testimonial fund, such as was in fact raised and presented to him in 1883.  In June 1879 he accepted the inevitable, and in a speech at Westport put himself with his parliamentary following and machinery at the service of the founder of the Irish Land League, uttering the keynote of Mr. Davitt’s “new departure” in his celebrated appeal to the Irish tenants to “keep a firm grip of their homesteads.”  In the middle of October 1879, Mr. Davitt formally organised the Irish National Land League, “to reduce rack-rents and facilitate the obtaining of the ownership of the land of Ireland by the occupiers,” and Mr. Parnell was made its first President.  He was sent out to America in that capacity, at the end of the year to explain to the Irish-American leaders the importance of supplying the new organisation with funds sufficient to enable it to take and keep the field at Westminster with a force of paid members not dependent for their support upon the Irish constituencies.  It was obviously impossible either to guarantee any considerable number of Irishmen holding property against loss by a policy aimed at the foundations of property, or to count upon finding for every Irish seat a member of local weight and stake, imbued with the spirit of martyrdom.

Mr. Parnell landed at New York on the 1st of January 1880.  An interview with him, written out on board of the steamer which took him to America by a correspondent detailed for that purpose, was published on the morning after his arrival.  It made on the whole an unfavourable impression in America, which was not improved by an injudicious quarrel into which he drifted with a portion of the American press, and which was distinctly deepened by his inexcusable misrepresentations of the conduct of Queen Victoria during the famine of 1847, and by his foolish attacks upon the management and objects of the Duchess of Marlborough’s fund for the relief of Irish distress.  The friends of Mr. Davitt in America, however, and the leaders of the most active Irish organisations there, came to the rescue, and as the two American parties were preparing their lines of battle for the Presidential conflict of 1880, Mr. Parnell was not only “put through” the usual course of “receptions” by Mayors and State legislatures, but invited on an “off-day” to address the House of Representatives at Washington.  His tour, however, on the whole, harmed more than it helped the new Irish movement on my side of the Atlantic, and when he was called back to take his part in the electoral contest precipitated by Lord Beaconsfield’s dissolution of Parliament at Easter 1880, Mr. Davitt went out to America himself to do what his Parliamentary associate had not succeeded in doing.  During this