In the spring of 1874 Mr. Gladstone formally resigned the leadership of his party, then in opposition, and withdrew to a considerable degree from active participation in parliamentary affairs, devoting himself with his accustomed zeal to his studies, which at that time were concerned with ecclesiastical subjects. From his retirement he emerged, in 1876, to write that trenchant series of letters on the "Bulgarian Atrocities," which so stirred the indignation of the English people that Disraeli was unable to carry them into an armed alliance with the red- handed Turk against the Russians. His fierce and persistent onslaughts upon the foreign policy of the government at length carried the nation with him and drove Disraeli (now Lord Beaconsfield) from power. No one but Mr. Gladstone could be thought of to head the ministry, and in 1880, he came in for his second term as Prime Minister. The state of Ireland again concerned him deeply. He carried an improved Land Act, but the Lords threw out his bill to relieve the special difficulties which the famine of 1880 had brought upon the Irish tenantry, and the exasperated tenantry resorted to reprisals upon the persons and property of the landlords. The Irish Land League, under the direction of Charles Stewart Parnell, resisted the operation of the new Land Act until its worth should have been tested. Mr. Gladstone and the Irish leaders worked at cross purposes, and thoroughly distrusted one another. The government found it necessary to exert force in order to suppress the agrarian disorders. Mr. Parnell and his associates were thrown into jail, and the Land League was proclaimed as an unlawful association. Parnell, whose word was law with the Leaguers, retaliated by forbidding the tenantry to pay rent. In the spring of 1882, when better feeling was beginning to prevail, some Irish conspirators (Invincibles) assassinated Lord Frederick Cavendish and his secretary in Phoenix Park, Dublin. Cavendish was the newly appointed secretary for Ireland, and appears to have been mistaken for W. E. Forster, his predecessor, who was held responsible for the rigorous measures of the past winter. The National League was formed to take the place of the proscribed Land League, and Irish distress and crime continued with little abatement. The "boycott" was applied in its most oppressive form, rents remained unpaid, and evictions were frequent and distressing. Cabinet dissensions over Irish measures and general criticism of the foreign policy which had made a generous peace with the Boers of South Africa, and was accused of abandoning General Gordon to his fate at Khartoum, weakened its hold upon the people and their representatives. The Irish members held the balance of power in the Commons, and when, in the spring of 1885, they joined forces with the Conservatives, the Liberals were again unseated.