Mr. Parnell next visited the United States to raise funds for the cause, was allowed, like Lafayette and Kossuth, to address Congress itself, and carried home L70,000. At the general election of 1880 he was returned for the counties of Meath and Mayo and for the city of Cork, and chose to sit for the last. He was now formally elected chairman of the Irish parliamentary party by twenty-three votes over eighteen for Mr. Shaw. Meantime the agrarian agitation grew, and in a speech at Ennis, September 19, 1880, he formulated the method of boycotting as an engine for punishing an unpopular individual. Mr. Gladstone's government now came to the conclusion that the objects of the Land League were contrary to the law, and in December put Parnell and several other members of the executive on trial, but the jury finally failed to agree. Next session the government brought in a Coercion Bill, which Mr. Parnell opposed vigorously. In the course of the struggle he was ejected from the House, after a stormy scene, together with thirty-four of his followers, February 3, 1881. Mr. Gladstone next carried his famous Land Bill, but this Parnell refused to accept as a final settlement until the result of certain test cases before the new Land Court was seen. On October 13th, Mr. Gladstone sent him to Kilmainham Jail, and there he lay till released on May 2, 1882, after some private negotiations with the government conducted through the medium of Captain O'Shea. Mr. Forster resigned the Irish secretaryship in consequence of the release, and next followed the terrible tragedy of Phoenix Park, of which Parnell, in his place in the House of Commons, expressed his detestation. [Illustration: Parnell testifying against the "Times."] The Crimes Act was now hurried through Parliament in spite of the strenuous opposition of the Irish party. Already the Land League had been proclaimed as an illegal association after the issue of the "No Rent" manifesto, but early in 1884 the Nationalists succeeded in reviving it under the name of the National League, and Mr. Parnell was elected its president. The year before the sum of L35,000, mostly raised in America, had been presented to him by his admirers. After an unsuccessful attempt to make terms with the Conservatives, in the course of which he had a famous interview with Lord Carnarvon, the viceroy, Parnell flung his vote--now eighty-six strong since the lowering of the franchise--into the Liberal scale and so brought about the fall of the short-lived first Salisbury government. Mr. Parnell nominated the greater number of Nationalist candidates for the Irish constituencies, and the firm hand with which he controlled his party was seen in the promptitude with which he crushed a revolt of Healy and Biggar against his nomination of Captain O'Shea for Galway.