“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. “Lord Landoff was a lawyer of high position at the English bar when, as Mr. Henry Matthews, he came into the Home Office. “The verdict of the jury was ‘guilty,’ and her sentence was death, which was a real surprise, as was afterward learned, even to the judge, Sir Fitz-James Stephen. If Mr. Matthews believed her guilty, he should not have commuted her sentence upon the ground that he assigned. If she was guilty she well deserved death on the scaffold. The evidence, however, satisfied Mr. Matthews that there was reasonable doubt that the death of Mr. Maybrick was due to arsenic. In this view, as is well known, he was sustained by Justice Stephen. If such a doubt really came into Mr. Matthews’s mind, as was made the ground of the commutation of the sentence, _under English law that doubt entitled the accused to acquittal_. “Why he lacked the courage of his convictions can only be surmised. At all events he did not dare to take the responsibility of allowing her to be executed.