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