Mr Parnell’s advances to the Revolutionists in America had an immediate reward, not only in the removal of any remaining obstacles in the path of his ambition, but in the supply of the sinews of war for the work of agitation and electioneering. Mr Davitt started the Land League with money obtained out of the Skirmishing Fund, established by O’Donovan Rossa in order to strike England “anywhere she could be hurt” and then in the hands of the Clan-na-Gael chiefs. But much more was needed, and in October, 1879, Mr Parnell started with Mr Dillon for the United States. During the voyage he imparted his views to the correspondent of a New York paper, afterwards a witness before the Special Commission, and told him, among other things, that his idea of a true revolutionary movement in Ireland was that it should partake both of a constitutional and an illegal character, “using the Constitution for its own purposes, but also taking advantage of the secret combinations.” He was cordially welcomed by most of the extreme faction, and gratified them with declarations quite to their own mind. He told them that the land question must be acted upon in “some extraordinary and unusual way” to secure any good result and that “the great cause could not be won without shedding a drop of blood.” He went even beyond this point in the famous speech at Cincinnati, which he subsequently attempted to deny, but which was reported in the Irish World and was held to be proved by Sir James Hannen and his colleagues. He then said that the “ultimate goal” at which Irishmen aimed was “to destroy the last link which kept Ireland bound to England.” The American wing were perfectly satisfied, and Mr Parnell, when he was summoned back to Ireland by the news of the dissolution, felt that he could rely on their support, pecuniary and other. It was not, at first, so easy to convince the Irish Fenians – who had distrusted and abjured any form of Parliamentary action – that they ought to vote for Parnellite candidates; and one or two Parnellite meetings were disturbed by this element. But Mr Parnell’s speeches during the electoral campaign of 1880 showed them how far he was prepared to go in their direction, and how little inclined he was, to use his own phrase, “to fix the boundary to the march of a nation.” It was at the time that Mr Parnell told, with great applause, the story which became very popular on Land League platforms, of the American sympathizer who offered him “five dollars for bread and 20 dollars for lead.” The leading spokesmen and organizers of the League, Sheridan, Brennan, Boyton, and Redpath, were either known Fenians or used language going beyond that of Fenianism; and the same thing may be said of Mr Biggar, Mr O’Kelly, and Mr Matt Harris, members of Mr Parnell’s Parliamentary following. The policy which Mr Davitt, acting as the envoy of the Irish extremists, thus used Mr Parnell to carry through, was developed in the announcement of the boycotting system in the autumn of 1880. Meanwhile, the alliance had already borne fruit at the general election of that year, when Mr Parnell, aided somewhat irregularly by Mr Egan out of the exchequer of the League, was returned for three constituencies – Meath, Mayo, and the city of Cork. He decided to sit for the last, and as “the member for Cork” he has since been known. The overthrow of the Beaconsfield Government, which had appealed to the country to strengthen the Empire against Irish disorder and disloyalty, was an encouragement to the Parnellites, who had a narrow and shifting majority in the ranks of the Parliamentary party. Mr Shaw was supplanted as chairman by Mr Parnell, and an open separation between the two sections ensued. The Parnellites took their seats on the Opposition benches; the Moderate Home Rulers sat on the Ministerial side below the gangway. To the latter Mr Gladstone seemed to incline most favourably, as he showed afterwards when he proposed to make Mr Shaw one of the Chief Commissioners under the Land Act. The Liberals, though they took the opportunity of dropping the Peace Preservation Act, were not disposed to reopen the land question, and it was only under pressure that Mr Forster hastily introduced the Compensation for Disturbance Bill, which was rejected in the House of Lords, and appointed the Bessborough Commission.
Mr Parnell and his party seized the opportunities afforded by the distress in Ireland and the Parliamentary situation to push on the operations of the League. The policy of boycotting had been expounded and enforced early in the year in Mr Parnell’s speech at Ennis, a few days after Lord Mountmorres’s murder, when he urged the peasantry if any man among them took an evicted farm to put the offender “into a moral Coventry by isolating him from the rest of his kind as if he were a leper of old.” This doctrine was rapidly propagated by Mr Dillon, Mr Biggar, and the organizers of the League, and in the autumn the persecution of Captain Boycott and many other persons became a public scandal. This system of acting upon those whom Mr Parnell had described as “weak and cowardly,” because they did not heartily join in the refusal to pay rent, has been pronounced on the highest judicial authority to amount to a criminal and illegal conspiracy, devised and carried out to lower the rental and selling price of land and to crush the landlords. Mr Parnell declared that he never incited to crime, but though he and his colleagues knew that boycotting and the unwritten law of the League led to outrages, wherever the organization spread, they took no effective measures to denounce and repress crime, and it is now plain that they could not do so without alienating the American support on which they were dependent. The ordinary law was shown to be powerless by the failure of the prosecution of Mr Parnell and others for conspiracy in Dublin in the opening days of 1881, when the jury disagreed, and Mr Parnell, in announcing the result to his American friends, telegraphed his thanks to the Irish World for “constant cooperation and successful support in our great cause.” But the progress of unpunished crime, in which the American-Irish brutally exulted, and the paralysis of the law compelled Mr Gladstone’s Government to act. Early in the Session of 1881 Mr Forster introduced his “Protection of Persons and Property Bill” and his “Arms Bill,” of which the former empowered the Executive to arrest and detain without trial persons reasonably suspected of crime. At the mere rumour of this Egan transferred the finances of the League to Paris. It was a part of Mr Parnell’s task, as he well knew, to fight the “coercion” measures tooth and nail, but, though he led the attack, the most critical conflicts were precipitated by the passion and imprudence of less cold-blooded politicians. We need not here recapitulate the history of that struggle, in which obstruction reached a height previously unknown, and in which the knot had to be cut for the moment by the enforcement of the inherent powers of the Chair. The Parnellite members were again and again suspended, and at length, after several weeks, both Bills were carried. Mr Parnell’s party had by this time assumed an attitude towards the Government of Mr Gladstone which was highly pleasing to the Irish World and the Nationalist organs in Ireland, but was ominous for the prospects of the Land Bill. They did not, however, venture to offer a direct and determined opposition to a measure securing great pecuniary advantages to the Irish tenants. They could not go beyond abstaining on the question of principle and denouncing the whole scheme as inadequate. Of course, if the Land Act had succeeded in accordance with Mr Gladstone’s sanguine hopes, it would have cut the ground from under Mr Parnell’s feet and deprived him of the basis of agitation on which his alliance with the Irish Extremists rested, and from which his party derived their pecuniary supplies. No sooner, therefore, had the Land Act become law than the word went forth from the offices of the League that the tenants were not to be allowed to avail themselves of it freely, but that only some “test cases” were to be put forward. The penalties of any infraction of this addition to the unwritten law were well understood, for all this while terrorism and outrage