Naturally enough, Mr.
Parnell, himself a landowner under the English settlement, shrank at first from committing himself and his fortunes 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.