“Officially I could only instruct you on behalf of a multitude of American citizens to investigate her case. Personally I beg to express to you my deep interest in it, and pray you, if possible, to communicate with Messrs. Lumley and Sir Charles Russell as to any method of American cooperation which may seem to them desirable.
“Messrs. Lumley have made a very able brief, which I am sure would interest you, and which seems to me unanswerable. Sir Charles Russell, whose reputation you know, is her counsel. Consult with them what best can be done, from an American point of view, to secure Mrs. Maybrick’s release. And if you shall have read Lumley’s brief, I am sure that conviction will lead you to personal activity in her behalf.
“You can communicate with me in strict confidence, as from one American citizen to another, for the relief of an American woman helplessly enduring a great wrong.
“Believe me, etc.,
“James G. Blaine.”
And yet it required the time from March 7, 1892, until July 20, 1904, to attain my liberation; and then it was accomplished by time limit and by no act of grace or concession on the part of the English Government.
Henry W. Lucy on Lord Russell
The Strand Magazine, London, in its November number, 1900, published an article by Henry W. Lucy, Esq., who, speaking of the late Lord Chief Justice Russell, says:
“The most remarkable episode in Charles Russell’s career at the bar undoubtedly was his defense of Mrs. Maybrick.
“I happened to find myself in the same hotel with him at Liverpool on the morning of the day set down for the opening of the trial. At breakfast he spoke in confident terms of his client’s innocence and of the surety of her acquittal. He did not take into account the passing mood of the judge who tried the case, and so found himself out of his reckoning; but the verdict of the jury, still less the summing-up of Fitz-James Stephen, did not shake his conviction. Sir Charles Russell was of all men least likely to be misled by appearances or deliberate deception; having probed the case to the bottom, having turned his piercing eyes on the woman in the dock, having talked to her in private and studied her in public, he was convinced of her innocence.