Meanwhile, in the midst of apparent peace, the elements of trouble in Ireland still quiescent were to come to a head and to give rise to a movement. The most formidable to British rule though skilfully masked, which had been seen since the rebellion of 1798. Revolutionary schemes in Ireland have always fastened on the land as the chief source from which they could derive strength; the United Irish movement as I have pointed out, was connected with a peasant movement against the payment of rent. This idea had been brought into marked prominence by John Finton Lalor, one of the rebels of 1848, a comparatively unknown but a sagacious man; 'You must associate' he wrote, 'the cause of Irish liberty, for which the people really care little with a cause for which they care a great deal; an inert mass must be yoked to a powerful engine; the Irish landlord must be driven from the land and the peasant masses be made its owners; and the fall of English power will follow that of its landlord garrison.' These words fell for the moment on unheeding ears; but the tradition has continued from that day to this the destruction of Irish 'landlordism' was one of the objects of the Fenian leaders of 1865-67, and they denounced the Irish gentry in atrocious language, though they did not know how to carry out their policy. This teaching was eagerly adopted by Michael Davitt, a Fenian, who had been convicted of a crime against the State; during a long imprisonment at Dartmoor, he brooded 'on his country's wrongs,' but satisfied himself that if the independence of Ireland was a patriot's first object, this could be attained only by uprooting the existing land system, by hounding on the occupiers of the soil against its owners, and by handing it over as spoil to the peasantry. Davitt was released from Dartmoor at the close of 1877; he attended a meeting in Dublin at which Parnell was present, and two of the assassins of the Phoenix Park tragedy; and he became supreme in the ranks of the Fenian societies, known as 'the Irish Republican Brotherhood,' which still retained a feeble life in Ireland, and even in England and Scotland. A short time afterwards he made his way to the United States, where he found the Fenians divided into two parties, known under the general name of the Clan na Gael, but having different objects, though with a common purpose. Both parties were for liberating Ireland 'from the Saxon yoke;' but the most violent and the most active sought to attain this end by expedients of desperate force; a 'skirmishing fund' had been established; 'England was to be invaded' by small bodies of 'resolute men;' her capital and chief towns were to be destroyed by dynamite. The other party, more prudent, but with similar aims, had been struck by Parnell's attitude in the House of Commons, and by the success of his unscrupulous tactics; its leaders began to think that something might be done by 'constitutional means;' they gradually came to an agreement with Davitt, that 'the overthrow of English domination' was to be their ultimate end; but that efforts in this direction were to be linked with energetic efforts to subvert 'the landlord system, a disgrace to humanity and to the civilisation of the present century;' to banish the Irish landed gentry from their country, and to secure their estates for their tenantry. This movement, though rebellious in no doubtful sense, was nevertheless to have a legal disguise; the wolf was to wear sheep's clothing; the 'formation of a peasant proprietary, and the abolition of arbitrary evictions,' were to be its proposed objects.[63]