lack of results achieved by Home Rulers and on 20 August 1876 dissolved the partnership and gave its members six months to withdraw from active co-operation with the Home Rule movement. The IRB supreme council enforced its resolution in March 1877 and John Barry and Patrick Egan resigned from the council. John O'Connor Power and Joseph Biggar refused to resign and were expelled. 1878 Revolutionary and constitutional nationalists remained in contact. In January 1877, James Joseph O'Kelly, a journalist with the New York Herald persuaded John Devoy to meet with Irish parliamentarians. In January 1878, Devoy met with Parnell in Dublin. In March the exiled senior IRB member John O'Leary and Supreme Council secretary John O'Connor met secretly in London with MPs Charles Stewart Parnell, Frank Hugh O'Donnell, William Henry O'Sullivan and O'Kelly (who would be elected MP in 1880). The meeting was "sought" by Parnell (according to Ranelagh) or by William Carroll of Clan na Gael (according to Moody) to consider co-operation between the IRB and Parnell. O'Leary stated his perhaps self-contradictory doctrine to them as follows: "Nine out of ten Irishmen entering the British Parliament with honest intentions are corrupted soon ... when once they get drawn into the whirlpool of British corruption in Dublin, with the West British society, the jobbery, the servility, very soon all the manliness goes out of them. If Irishmen are to save their honour, they must keep aloof from everything English... I am not saying that good members would not be better than bad ones, if they could keep right. George Henry Moore meant well". Parnell apparently merely listened and did not commit himself. John O'Connor and Dr Mark Ryan, both members of the IRB's Supreme Council, believed O'Connor Power had some hand in the new departure. O'Connor [John O'Connor] suspected that Davitt had been influenced by O'Connor Power, and that the new departure proposals concealed some sinister scheme of Power's devising – assumptions that Davitt hotly rejected.' 'The precedent for constitutional agitation set by Power was not lost on orthodox Fenians such as Dr Mark Ryan, who saw behind the new departure the nefarious influence of the member for Mayo.' In late 1878 Michael Davitt of the IRB made a fund-raising political lecture tour of the United States, promoted by William Carroll and John Devoy of Clan na Gael. On 13 October in Brooklyn, New York Davitt first presented, in a