36 MIGHTY STATE SECRETS OF THE LATE WAR. "chance in the race of life" would be wanting to millions of human beings who to-day call this nation noble, and who, I trust, will live to call it blessed. Thus far we have done our supreme duty. Shall we now, when the victory won in war is written in the treaty of peace and the civilized world applauds and waits in expectation, turn timidly away from the duties imposed upon the country by its own great deeds? And when the mists fade and we see with clearer vision, may we not go forth rejoicing in a strength which has been employed solely for humanity and always been tempered with justice and mercy, confident of our ability to meet the exigencies which await, because confident that our course is one of duty and our cause that of right?" MIGHTY STATE SECRETS OF THE LATE WAR. Conditions that Demanded Delay in Beginning Hostilities. N BY GENERAL STEWART L. WOODFORD, (Ex-Minister to Spain.) OW that peace terms have been consummated by which Spain and America are upon a basis of mutual understanding that permits resumption of friendly intercourse, it is no violation of proprieties in me to reveal some of the happenings at Washington and Madrid while I had the honor of holding the position of United States Minister to Spain. When appointed to that important post I carried with me to Madrid instructions from the President to direct my efforts to the accomplishing of three things : One was to secure justice for Cuba; another was to see that our commercial interests in that island were no longer embarrassed, and the third was to demand the withdrawal from Cuba of General Weyler on or before October 31, 1897-or to demand the passports of the American Minister. I delivered my instructions to the Duke of Tetuan, the Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs, and he promptly told me that under no circumstances would General Weyler be withdrawn from Cuba until the end of the two years for which he had been sent there. What the Duke of Tetuan refused to do and what American diplomacy failed to secure was accomplished by providential means. The Conservative MIGHTY STATE SECRETS OF THE LATE WAR. 37 Government resigned, the Sagasta Ministry came into power, and on October 29, I think it was, two days before the time set for General Weyler's recall by the President, Weyler was recalled. The weeks drifted by and February 15, 1898, came, when our battleship was blown up in the harbor of Havana. Through departments other than the State Department I received telegraphic information on February 18 that there was not on American ships or in the ordnance depots in the United States more than two rounds of powder per gun and per man, and I was therefore told to exhaust the arts Our Navy Without of peace until April 15, the earliest date at which we could be anywhere near ready for war, and that, in any event, smokeless powder for both the navy and the ariny would be another impossibility. Ammunition. I did the best I could; but let me inform you that, had it not been for the unfaltering, unchanging and loyal friendship of England and the attitude of her Minister at Madrid, I might have failed to do the little I did do, because the representatives at Madrid of Continental Europe were ready at any time to interfere with the plans of the United States, if the British Minister would only join them. In the meantime the work of preparation went on at home, and to show you how accurately the time was gauged, I may tell you of the run of a sealed express train across the continent, the contents of which train no man outside of Washington, and only two there, knew. It had the right of way over all other trains. When it reached San Francisco its cargo was transferred to the Mohican, which raced to Honolulu. There the cargo was shifted to the "Baltimore," which carried it to Hong Kong, and on April 23 the cargo was distributed among the American warships there, and Dewey had the ammunition he wanted. On April 24 he got his orders to sail for Manila. That ammunition on May Day awoke echoes in Manila Bay that were heard round the world and took from Spain an empire. The war with Spain has been likened to the hundred days in France. Those one hundred days changed the map of Europe for twenty years. The days of our war changed the map of the world and changed it forever. Loyal Americans may differ as to politics, but upon one thing we cannot differ. We tore down the sovereignty of Spain in the Philippines. We must either establish there a form of government as we know government, or we must guarantee the protection of life and property there until the peoples of those islands show that they can govern themselves. We must do one of these two things. It is our duty and we cannot shirk it. I agree with any one who says that if we govern the Philippines as we govern American cities we will not Our Duty in the 38 THE PRELUDE TO AN EMPIRE'S FALL. succeed. If we put in power there men who have been leaders of ward caucuses in New York, Brooklyn, or Philadelphia, the Philippines will be to us a curse instead of a blessing. But, thank God, we have a man at the helm, your President and my President, who, instead of insisting upon a policy of his own, is waiting to hear from the people he governs, and in this country it has ever been that the voice of the people is the voice of God. THE PRELUDE TO AN EMPIRE'S FALL. BY J. W. BUEL. E would have been endowed with more than human foresight-universal consensus would have doubtless pronounced him a visionary -who, in the early spring of 1898, should have foretold not only that in the course of a few weeks the Union would be in the throes of a war to the bitter end with Spain, but that within one hundred days the whilom mistress of the Western World would have lost her sway over any portion of it forever. Not, indeed, that the primary causes for such a couflict were lacking, or that no cloud overhead bespoke the gathering storm; on the contrary, the long series of Spain's misdeeds in the West Indies for centuries past had left behind it a blood-stained trail along which retribution could not fail to reach her, when the time came, with swifter, surer strides, as her punishment had been withheld, the longer. It has been tersely said that, up the present, the history of Cuba has been a tragedy. The term is appropriate, and would apply as well to the other Spanish possessions in the West Indies and to the Philippines; yet it needs qualification. We have here a tale of woe that none of the softer influences of the tragic drama ever came to alleviate; a plot of well-nigh incredible infamy, the perpetrators of which have no other incentive than their rapacity, and not a thrill of virtuous impulse to mitigate their crime; a picture of darkness unrelieved to the eye save by the purple gleam of the murderer's blade or the pallor of starving spectres, with no other silver lining than the treacherous glamor of pledges unfulfilled, unless it be the fitful flash of a heroic deed at the hands of a forlorn hope. It were needless, at this juncture, to retrace the drainings of Cuba's resources, which was started by her discoverer, Columbus himself, 400 years THE PRELUDE TO AN EMPIRE'S FALL. 39 ago. She was spoken of by her lusty conquerors under a variety of names, "Juana," in honor of Prince John, the son of Ferdinand and Isabella; "Ferdinandina," in remembrance of Ferdinand after his death; "Cuba," her original Indian name; "Santiago" and "Ave Maria," after St. James, the patron of Spain, Romantic Titles. and the Virgin Mary, respectively; but whether under Pious Remembrances and these, or any of those endearing epithets, "the Garden of the West," "the Summer Isle of Eden," etc., which the irony of fate placed upon their lips, Cuba lay helpless in the grasp of her oppressors until 1762, when the British occupation of Havana bade her hope for a new era of unknown welfare and prosperity. The vista soon faded away, however; the treaty of Paris, the outcome of a coalition of Spain, France, Austria and Russia against Great Britain, restored Havana to Spain; the beneficial reforms initiated by the British were kept up only so far as they ministered to the insatiable greed of those in power; and the dawn of the nineteenth century brought no brighter prospect to the unfortunate island. It may seem remarkable to the superficial observer that our first intervention in Cuba's affairs was directed towards the maintenance of Spanish rule there; in 1825 France was emphatically told that we could not consent to the occupation of Cuba or Porto Rico by any other European power than Spain under any contingency whatever; in 1840, and again in 1843, our intentions in this, respect were conveyed to Great Britain in scarcely less unequivocal terms; but it is superfluous to emphasize the fact that we were then merely asserting the tenets of our new Monroe Doctrine (first enunciated in the Presidential message of 1823), and not in any way upholding a regime which had proved so blighting a curse on every colony to which it had been applied. Years rolled by; our own civil war engrossed for a time our entire attention; and when, on its termination, we felt stronger than ever to urge the necessity of reform on the government of Queen Isabella, the dethronement of the latter in 1868 opened a new chapter in the annals of Cuba. Brooks No For the first time, the legion of office-hunting Spaniards, whose occupation in Peru and other enfranchised South American colonies was gone, and whose traffic in blood-stained gold Spain's Arrogance was now confined to Cuba and Porto Rico-the "Peninsulars," as they are called-found themselves face to face with a regularly organized insurrection on the part of the natives or "Insulars," as they were designated. 0 40 THE PRELUDE TO AN EMPIRE'S FALL. The revolution of 1868 in Spain had no sooner been announced than Carlos Manuel de Cespedes, a well-known Cuban lawyer and wealthy planter, raised the standard of revolt and quickly found himself at the head of an army of 15,000 strong. A declaration of independence, setting forth the too glaring causes that justified it, was published at Manzanillo, on October 10; in the following month of April, at a congress summoned at Quaymaro, a Republican constitution was, framed and Cespedes elected president. Mexico and other South American States recognized the Cubans as belligerents; it was not long ere Peru went one step farther and acknowledged their independence; what was to be known as Cuba's ten years' war was in full sway, and under promising auspices. Of the methods adopted by the military authorities to face this new condition of affairs, one instance will suffice; it is contained in a proclamation issued by General de Valmaseda in April, 1869, which reads as follows: "1. Every man, from the age of fifteen years, upwards, who is found away from his habitation (finca) and does not prove a justified motive there Iniquitous Laws that Shame Spain. for, will be shot. "2. Every habitation unoccupied will be burned by the troops. "3. Every habitation from which does not float a white flag, as a signal that its occupants desire peace, will be reduced to ashes. D "Women that are not living at their own homes, or at the houses of their relatives, will collect in the town of Jiguani, or Bayamo, where maintenance will be provided. Those who do not present themselves will be conducted forcibly." Not more than one example seems needed either, to illustrate the cowardly hypocrisy with which politicians played their part in this war. loudly-heralded bill, the Moret bill, which was to emancipate certain classes of slaves, was elaborately passed and became a law amid the plaudits of Europe, in June, 1870. On examination it was found that this would-be emancipatory measure simply relieved the slave owner from supporting the very young and the very old, while it strengthened and prolonged his hold of the able-bodied, but even such as it was, the outside world thought it had been in operation for almost two years before the Peninsulars even permitted it to be publicly announced in Cuba. In November, 1875, President Grant determined, if possible, to bring matters to an issue, and a note was sent to the Spanish governinent, of which this was the concluding paragraph: |