Due to his education in a Methodist school, Davitt accepted differences in creed. He was opposed to the influence of clergy in politics, and was determined to perpetuate the inclusive nationalism of the Young Ireland movement, rather than let Irish nationalism transmute into a sectarian Catholic movement. Davitt's left-wing views made him a natural ally of the Radical faction of the Liberal Party, and he supported the alliance between Home Rule supporters and the Liberal Party. Unlike many other Irish nationalist leaders, Davitt was in favour of women's suffrage. According to biographer T. W. Moody, hatred of the British empire and landlordism "was in his blood", but having grown up in England, Davitt actually liked English people and understood the priorities of the working class in England. According to English historian Michael Kelly, Davitt's renunciation of political violence made him "the Irish Republican Brotherhood’s greatest apostate". Davitt opposed the random use of force, such as by the Ribbon societies. On the other hand, he never fully renounced violence and, according to Irish historian Paul Bew, was involved in smuggling arms for the IRB between his first release from prison and his expulsion from the IRB council in 1880. Because he considered the landlord system inherently violent, Davitt believed it was moral to use force against it. However, for political reasons he presented the Land League as a peaceful movement and denied that his anti-landlord rhetoric consisted of incitement to violence. Davitt denounced agrarian crime as "a species of cowardly terrorism which would do irreparable injury to Ireland" and the Maamtrasna murders as "almost without a parallel for its atrocity in the annals of agrarian outrage". However, the Land League leaders were not in control of their rank-and-file, who frequently used violence to intimidate others into withholding rent and to frighten landlords and their agents. Between 1879 and 1881, crimes related to the Land War rose from 25% to 58% of all crime in Ireland, without the leaders calling for an end to the agitation. Davitt's "final break with the Fenians" did not come until the 1882 Phoenix Park murders of the Chief Secretary and Permanent Undersecretary for Ireland. In 1903, Davitt travelled to Kishinev, Bessarabia in the Russian Empire as "special commissioner to investigate the massacres of the Jews" on behalf of Hearst's "New York American", becoming one of the first foreign journalists to report on the Kishinev pogrom.