“If British subjects are being arrested for no more illegal acts than those which the prisoner is charged with having committed, or of the intention to commit which he is justly suspected, it seems that, however arbitrary and despotic we may consider the ‘Coercion’ Act to be, we are, nevertheless, bound to submit in silence to the action taken under it by the authorities even against our own fellow citizens.
“It should be observed that this act is a law of the British Parliament, the legitimate source and final arbiter of all law in these realms, and that, as it would be manifestly futile to ask the government here to make an exception on behalf of an American who had brought himself within the provisions of any law thus sanctioned, so it would be manifestly unbecoming in a diplomatic representative, unless by express direction of his superiors, to enter upon an argument with the government to which he is accredited as to the policy of such a law or the necessarily arbitrary nature of its enforcement.”
That neither he nor the American government was hard on the “suspects” appears from several letters, of which this illustrates the tenor:—
TO OUR CONSUL AT LIMERICK.
You will please see without delay John McInerny and Patrick Slattery, suspects claiming to be American citizens and confined in Limerick jail, and say to each of them that “in case he should be liberated you have authority to pay him forty pounds sterling for his passage to the United States,” for which sum you may draw upon me at sight.
This sort of correspondence ended in May, 1882. The following letter was practically the end of it.
TO MR. FRELINGHUYSEN.
Meanwhile it is nearly certain that all the suspects, except those charged with crimes of violence, will be very shortly set at liberty, thus rendering nugatory the most effective argument in favor of disorder and resistance to the law.
To turn from such correspondence to his frank relations with the people of England, it is interesting to see how readily he accepted the modern theory of American diplomacy. This makes the foreign minister the representative not only of the administration, but of every individual among the people. It recognizes the people as indeed the sovereign. In this view, for instance, the American minister has to place rightly the inquiries of every person in the United States who thinks that there is a fortune waiting for him in the custody of the Court of Chancery. In such cases the American citizen addresses “his minister” directly. On a large scale the foreign minister has the same sort of correspondence as the “domestic minister” at home, of whose daily mail half is made up of the inquiries of people who have not an encyclopædia, a directory, or a dictionary, or, having them, find it more easy to address the clergyman whose name they first see in the newspaper. They turn to him to ask what was the origin of the Aryan race, or what is meant by the fourth estate.
The reader who has not delved into the diplomatic correspondence does not readily conceive of the range of subjects which thus come under the attention of an American minister abroad, in the present habit, which unites the old diplomacy and the formality of old centuries with the hustling end-of-the-century practice, in which every citizen enjoys the attention of the minister. In Lowell’s case subjects as various as the burial of John Howard Payne’s body, the foot-and-mouth disease in cattle, the theological instruction in the schools of Bulgaria, the assisted emigration to America of paupers from Ireland, and the nationality of Patrick O’Donnell occupy one year’s correspondence. Those of us who think that the old diplomacy is as much outside modern life as chain mail is, or the quintessences of old chemistry, might well take the body of John Howard Payne as an object-lesson.