e and all other
cases in which Americans may be arrested."

There was no mistaking the tone of this despatch. It was instantly
transmitted to the British Foreign Secretary, who replied the same day
that "the matter would receive the immediate attention of Her Majesty's
Government."

The reference made to the Coercion Act by Mr. Frelinghuysen touched a
plain and precise provision, that persons detained under the Act
"should not be discharged or tried by any court without the direction of
the Lord-Lieutenant." Had the Coercion Act received from Mr. Blaine in
March 1881 the attention bestowed upon it in March 1882 by Mr.
Frelinghuysen, this provision might have been used to obviate the
dangerous accumulation of injustice to individuals, and of international
irritation, resulting from the application to possibly innocent foreign
citizens in Ireland of the despotic powers conferred by that Act upon
Mr. Gladstone's Government, powers as nearly as possible analogous with
those which Mr. Gladstone himself, years before, had denounced in
unmeasured terms when they were claimed and exercised by the Government
of Naples in dealing with its own subjects.

After the consideration by Her Majesty's Government of this despatch of
the United States Government, it is understood in America that Mr.
Forster, as Chief Secretary for Ireland, was invited to communicate with
the Lord-Lieutenant, and request him to exercise his discretion in the
sense desired, and that Mr. Forster positively refused to do this.

How this may be I do not pretend to say. But as no satisfactory reply
was made to the American despatch, and as public feeling in the United
States grew daily more and more determined that a stop should be put to
the unexplained arrest and the indefinite detention of American citizens
in Ireland, the American Secretary of State made up his mind towards the
end of the month of March to repeat his despatch of March 3d in a more
terse and peremptory form. As a final preliminary to this step, however,
Mr. Frelinghuysen was induced to avail himself of the unusual and
officious intervention of his most distinguished living predecessor in
the State Department, Mr. Hamilton Fish. After measuring the gravity of
the situation, Mr. Fish at the end of March sent a despatch to an
eminent public man, well known on both sides of the Atlantic, and now
resident in London, with authority to show it personally to Mr.
Gladstone, to the effect that if a