in earnest "the dynamite section of
the Irish people"?

NOTE C.

THE AMERICAN "SUSPECTS" OF 1881. (Prologue, p. xlvii.)

In his recently published and very interesting _Life of Mr. Forster_,
Mr. Wemyss Reid alludes to some action taken by the United States
Government in the spring of 1882 as one of the determining forces which
brought about the abandonment at that time by Mr. Gladstone of Mr.
Forster's policy in Ireland. Without pretending to concern myself here
with what is an essentially British question as between Mr. Forster and
Mr. Gladstone, it may be both proper and useful for me to throw some
light, not, perhaps, in the possession of Mr. Reid, upon the part taken
in this matter by the American Government. Sir William Harcourt's
"Coercion Bill" was passed on the 2d of March 1881, two days before the
inauguration of General Garfield as President of the United States. Mr.
Blaine, who was appointed by the new President to take charge of the
Foreign Relations of the American Government, received, on the 10th of
March, at Washington, a despatch written by Mr. Lowell, the American
Minister in London, on the 26th of February, being the day after the
third reading in the Commons of the "Coercion Bill." In this despatch
Mr. Lowell called the attention of the American State Department to a
letter from Mr. Parnell to the Irish National Land League, dated at
Paris, February 13, 1881, in which Mr. Parnell attempted to make what
Mr. Lowell accurately enough described as an "extraordinary" distinction
between "the American people" and "the Irish nation in America."

"This double nationality," said Mr. Lowell, "is likely to be of great
practical inconvenience whenever the 'Coercion Bill' becomes law." By
"this double nationality" in this passage, the American Minister, of
course, meant "this claim of a double nationality;" for neither by Great
Britain nor by the United States is any man permitted to consider
himself at one and the same time a citizen of the American republic and
a subject of the British monarchy. Nor was he quite right in
anticipating "great practical inconvenience" from this "claim," upon
which neither the British nor the American Government for a moment
bestowed, or could bestow, the slightest attention.

The "great practical inconvenience" which, first to the American
Legation in England, then to the United States Government at Washington,
and finally to the Cabinet of Mr. Gladstone, did, however,