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 any further delay occurred in complying with the moderate and reasonable demand of the American Government for the immediate release or the immediate trial of the American "suspects," the relations between Great Britain and the United States would be very seriously "strained."