No. 46.
Mr. Lowell
to Earl Granville.
London, April 14, 1882. (Received April 15.)
My Lord: I have the honor to acquaint you that I have received this morning two applications for my intervention from citizens of the United States who have been arrested under the protection of person and property act (Ireland) 1881. One of them is William Brophy, who sends his certificate of naturalization, and states that he was arrested on the 4th March last, and is confined in Naas jail. The other is John Leonard Gannon, who asserts that he was born at Hampton Hill, in the State of Connecticut, on the 13th December, 1852, and imprisoned in the jail at Galway on the 7th May, 1881, on suspicion of being one of an unlawful assembly. He says also that he knows nothing further of the charge against him or of his accuser.
I have no information of the causes why Brophy was arrested, but I shall write to our consul at Dublin to ascertain what is stated in the warrant on this subject, and I may have occasion to address your lordship again in relation to it.
In respect to the case of Mr. Gannon, his imprisonment has now continued for so long a period that I am sure your lordship will understand why I ask your attention to it with unusual earnestness.
It is so contrary to the spirit of English as well as of American law to keep a man in [Page 261] prison for many months without any opportunity of confronting his accusers or of disproving the charges against him, that your lordship cannot be surprised at the great excitement which such cases as this of Mr. Gannon have occasioned in the United States, or at the instructions I have received from my government to ask respectfully that the accused parties may either be released or brought to trial.
I beg leave to repeat this request in the cases of Mr. Brophy and Mr. Gannon, as well as of other American citizens who have been imprisoned in Ireland, some of them for long periods of time.
I have, &c.,