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, arise from the application of Sir William Harcourt’s Coercion Act of 1881 to American citizens in Ireland, had its origin not in Mr. Parnell’s preposterous idea of an Irish nationality existing in the United States, but in the failure of the authorities of the United States to deal promptly and firmly with the situation created for American citizens in Ireland by the administration of Sir William Harcourt’s Act.