on the wires announcing the invincible hero proceeding by forced marches on the way to Havana, which certainly he would assault in a few days! This methodical fabrication was in its nature the same discovered in the official Spanish dispatches. The truth was not valued on either side. Maceo fell in

a skirmish after he had crossed Weyler's trocha and met four hundred men who were advised of his coming. He was not "lured" by the Spaniards under a flag of truce and assassinated, as stated with all the pomp of fiction. He rode up to the firing when a Spanish column was, not unexpectedly, encountered, and was killed by a Mauser bullet through the neck. The story of his betrayal and murder was frantically worked, in the hope that Americans might be exasperated to madness and rushed headlong into war. The Spanish falsehood for this incident was that there was a "battle" in which the soldiers of Spain were most brave and that the rebels were routed, Maceo falling in the midst of the affray. The "battle" was a skirmish-line affair, over in a few minutes, and Maceo's men, recovering his body, gave it secret burial. With his fall the aggressive impulse of the insurgents ceased, with the exception of the operations conducted in the eastern provinces by General Garcia. There was no intermission, however, in the triumphant chapters of militant Cuban literature, transmitted from Key West. The Cuban army, as it appeared when the American army landed in Cuba, was not what had been represented, and it was evident that there had been deliberate deception carried on by the Cuban Bureau of Intelligence, specially provided for its effect upon the American people. However, the Gomez policy had been successful in stopping work in the fields, and the "troops" of the Cuban government were willing to receive rations from the American army of liberation, but they were resolute to retain their arms until they could find a paymaster; and they will not go into another rebellion while their names are on a payroll. It is their misfortune that under the guidance of Gomez they destroyed the industries of their country that Spain might be harmed, but made themselves poor indeed.

When the ten years' war in Cuba began in 1868, there were less than seven thousand Spanish regulars on the island, and after reinforcements, one hundred thousand strong, had been sent across the Atlantic, neither the military nor the civil administration of Spain in the last of her great provinces had been improved. The sharpest offense that could be given the Spaniards was to propose as a tentative alternative that the insurgents should have

rights as belligerents, and yet the greatest army any nation ever transported three thousand miles was year after year unable to report decisive progress in campaigns of pacification. There was not a public man in Spain who did not know that the one thing needful to the Spanish cause in Cuba was military success, and there was an army of regulars that should number nearly or quite one hundred thousand, with firemen, policemen and volunteers nearly fifty thousand, and a swarm of gunboats and ships of war forming a coast guard; and yet there were no results from the presence of this immense array which was consuming the life of Spain. The Spanish Cabinet and diplomatic representatives prayed for military success to build a hope upon, but the only victories for the Spaniards were the extension of deserts; the spread of famine, and the stalking abroad of pestilence. The distance from Spain to Cuba was greater than the fleets or legions of the Romans covered, and the British armies that crossed the Atlantic in the attempted subjugation of the thirteen revolted colonies, never showed fifty per cent of the numerical strength of the Spaniards of the regular army in Cuba. The Spanish volunteers were additional, and yet, until in the final strife that preceded the armed intervention of the United States, the western provinces of Cuba were not seriously molested, and the sugar and tobacco crops up to that time increased. It is only in the studies of Spanish character, both in the peninsula and the island, by Caleb Cushing, our Minister to Spain in the closing years of Grant's administration, that the phenomenon of the inability of the Spanish forces to take a vigorous initiative is explained. The military capacity of the Spanish race has in modern times been almost exclusively defensive. The side that has the privilege of ambuscades and can pursue the strategy and the tactics of evasion, elusion and procrastination is unconquerable, except by soldiers of a tougher fiber and a more alert and determined spirit in advancing upon concealed foes than themselves. The Cubans could no more fight battles with Spanish regulars in the open field than the Spaniards could fight the French in regular order in the warfare with Napoleon. Wellington found his Spanish allies, during the Peninsular war, uncertain and fantastic, as the American generals discovered the Cubans, who emerged from the swamps and mountains when Shafter's divisions were climbing the hills of Santiago, alternately scorched and drenched, and stricken with ghastly fevers. It turned out that the Spaniards, ineffectual in attacking the Cuban guerrillas in familiar fastnesses, when intrenched

behind entanglements of barbed wire, were keen and steady as defenders, standing up to their work manfully; but their courage in resisting assaults was no more testimony that their colonial system was not disastrous infamy, than the success of the Cubans in bushwhacking was evidence that they had organized a Republic and should resume the art of government where the Spaniards left it.

All there was of the Cuban question that concerned us was thrashed over during the ten years' war, 1868-78. Out of a hundred thousand men the Spaniards then had in Cuba, they lost seventeen thousand from sickness in 1877, and the next year treated with the armed insurgents, bribing some, cajoling others, promising all things with a broad profusion that was proof they attached no value to their words. There was peace for a few years— that is, there were intrigues in place of skirmishes, when, as has been the stated custom in the stories of Spanish colonial conflicts, the stipulations of reformation without performance having run their course, hostilities were resumed at the old stands in the well-known ways, with the usual Junta in New York, and the regular equipments all around. This time the brain that organized the customary outbreak was in a civil capacity José Marti, with Maximo Gomez as the military chieftain, supreme in general direction, and Antonio Maceo, a soldier of personal daring and many high qualities. Early in the conflict Marti, exposing himself to encourage followers, was slain, and within two years the two Maceos, plunging into desperate situations, perished. The chieftains of the insurgents invaded eastern Cuba in small boats, finding their way from Hayti to appointed Cuban coves, where friends awaited them, and it was not long before the development that a revolt against the Spaniards of the Peninsula, of a more sanguinary and destructive nature than ever, had been encountered. The constant cry of the Spanish through the years of bloody contention was that the Cuban rebels would, if it was in their power, make of the splendid island an enlarged San Domingo-and the horrors of French experience were recited to terrorize all who were unwilling to accept barbarism as freedom. The Spanish cartoons on display in Havana always represented the rebellion as personified by a black man, uncouth and horrid, torch and knife in hand, grossly threatening Cuba drawn as a beautiful white woman; Uncle Sam-an unwieldy hog with snout and tail, a starry hat and striped coat-tails and trousers-instigating the black monster to violence. It was the Gomez policy to accept this issue by the use of the

torch, and the war took on a dreadful aspect, in widespread plantation fires rolling westward, the fiery clouds of conflagrations consuming the cane fields and mills, and finally the tobacco houses stored with leaves precious as fine gold. The insurgents burned the better houses and laid waste the areas of black and red sugar and tobacco land, whose cultivation had yielded marvelous opulence. In turn the Spaniards burned the humbler dwellings and the villages they could not garrison. The Cubans were accomplished horsemen, and domestic animals and the fruit trees afforded the shifty, irregular cavaliers food supplies. The Spaniards slaughtered the horses and cattle they could not ride or drive away, and the sheep and pigs it was inconvenient to capture and hold in pens were massacred. On both sides there was infuriated savagery, and the wretched camps, where famine and pestilence made war most hideous, were the result. The responsibility rested upon both parties to the interminable conflict of barbarities. Weyler and Gomez were the representative men of this diabolical warfare. More and more, the people in Cuba of intelligence equal to understanding that there must be order before prosperity could be restored, and that authority must be found and applied, not committed to the everlasting confusion and reprisals of the partisans of vengeance, before the restoration of hopefulness would be rational, were persuaded and convinced that with the people of the United States and their army and navy must rest the responsibility, and in them be found the capacity for saving jurisdiction. The Cuban Republic, if the island. should be turned over to the Key West and New York colonies, and the bands that are in arms looking for money that they may continue to be an army, and play the part the Spaniards have played out, would make the fruition of American sacrifices the extension of unmitigated San Domingo terrors. It is the first obligation of the United States in possession of Cuba, to American civilization, to use the force necessary to prevent this consummation, most devoutly to be deprecated, and the fact should be fearlessly presented, discussed without hesitation, declared without the shadow of misgiving, that the correct policy of our country is and always has been that of the ultimate annexation of Cuba. The island wants American rule, and not a continuance of the Spanish styles of tyranny, corruption and spoliation, whether direct or indirect. We did not make war in Cuba for our health, and in the island of the palm and the orange, coffee and cane, tropic woods and iron ores, of fruits and flowers, birds and fishes of surpassing beauty and