Spanish guns. Before the end of July nearly half of their force was disabled by sickness, and the arrival, on July 28th, of a body of fresh troops from the North American colonies was a most welcome reinforcement. These earliest American invaders of Cuba consisted of a thousand men from Connecticut, eight hundred from New York, and five hundred from New Jersey, with General Lyman, of the first-named colony, in command. It is worth. recording that Israel Putnam, destined to win fame in the Revolution, was acting colonel of the Connecticut regiment.

The Morro was stormed a few days later, and on August 13th the city surrendered, the garrison being allowed to march out with the honours of war. An immense quantity of spoil fell to the victors, who confiscated public property and levied contributions unsparingly. The tobacco and sugar seized and sold on the spot alone brought three and a half million dollars. Sir George Pocock, who commanded the fleet, and Lord Albemarle drew six hundred thousand dollars apiece as prize money. The comparative value that eighteenth-century officialdom attached to officers and men may be inferred from the fact that each soldier's share was twenty dollars and each sailor's eighteen.

The territory surrendered to the British stretched eastward to Matanzas, but they had made no effort to push their conquests when peace was proclaimed, and on the 6th of July, 1763, they evacuated Cuba, George III's Government having accepted in exchange the Spanish province of Florida-which was returned to Spain twenty years later. While holding Havana the soldiers were terribly scourged by disease. Mante, a chaplain from New England, has left in his diary a vivid picture of the sufferings of his compatriots, in whose camp the "putrid fever" wrought frightful havoc. Only a remnant returned alive.

Cuba's golden period.

To Havana a year of British occupation was not without benefit. Efforts were made to improve the sanitary condition of a city which Spanish incompetence allowed to remain a hotbed of fever to the present day. Its port, for the first time, was opened to the commerce of the nations, and the world's attention was called to the possibilities of Cuba as a mart for trade. Havana's importance as a modern city may be said to have begun at this point, although with the restoration of Spanish rule the law giving Spain a monopoly of traffic with Cuba was temporarily reaffirmed. At the end of the eighteenth century it was probably the largest American city of European settlement, and certainly the richest and most important seaport in the new world.

Luis de las Casas, who came out as captaingeneral in 1790, did much for Havana, helping to form its Sociedad Patriotica (Patriotic Society), to found its first newspaper, the Papel Periodico, and to promote useful public works. Another name of the same period that is held in grateful memory is that of Francisco Arango. Born in Havana in 1765, Arango was secretary of the local chamber of commerce when Napoleon drove the Bourbon dynasty from Madrid, in July, 1808. The Spanish officials in Cuba promptly met, and at four thousand miles' distance defied the conqueror of Europe by affirming their loyalty to the deposed sovereign. Their action won for Cuba the title of the Ever Faithful Isle-a name of grim irony, in the light of later events—and the privilege, bestowed by the constitution framed in 1812, when Ferdinand VII returned to his throne, of representation in the Cortes at Madrid. Arango went to Spain as one of the first Cuban delegates, and secured the final abolition of the law debarring foreign ships from the ports of the island.

LIBRARY

OF TAR

UNIVERSITY

OF CALIFORNIA

The first quarter of the nineteenth century has been called the "golden period" of Cuba's history. It was for her a time of general internal tranquility, and of great industrial and commercial development. She was benefited by the fact that Spain was at its lowest ebb of weakness both at home and abroad. For years at a time, during the Napoleonic wars, communication with Madrid was cut off by the hostile sea power of Britain, which, though it seized Trinidad, made no further attack upon Cuba. The successful revolt of all the mainland colonies, too, seemed at least temporarily to have opened the ear of the Spanish Government to Cuban grievances. At the same time it brought loyalist settlers to the island, just as Canada, after the American Revolution, became a refuge for colonists who preferred their old allegiance. A more important immigration came from Haiti, whence thirty thousand white families, victims of the island's race war, are said to have fled to Cuba between 1798 and 1808, bringing with them the cultivation of coffee-which became the chief Cuban product, till superseded by sugar. All these causes contributed to the island's rapid advance in wealth and population. She had but 170,370 inhabitants in 1775, and 272,140 in 1791. The number grew to 551,998 in 1817, to 704,487 in 1827, and to 1,007,624 in 1841..

But with all this material development signs of Cuba's later troubles were not lacking.

The West Indies seem to be well fitted by nature to be the home of civilized and prosperous communities, yet European colonization can show little, if anything, but failure in that rich chain of islands. They have had four centuries of checkered history-history full of revolts and massacres, of crimes and horrors, of battles fought for the spoils of war. The white conquerors exterminated the native tribes, to replace them with negro slaves; and it has been their just retribution to see the

African multiply and possess the land where the superior race failed to take thrifty root. In Haiti negro domination has long been absolute. Jamaica, always orderly under English rule, and for a time a prosperous colony, has but a dwindling remnant of a few thousand whites to more than half a million coloured inhabitants. In the lesser islands-British or French, Danish or Dutch-the story is the same.

To this long chapter of failures Cuba has appeared as the conspicuous exception. With all her mistakes and shortcomings as a colonizing power, Spain seemed to have done in the West Indies what France and England could not do-to have planted the seeds of a community capable of becoming a civilized nation. But recent history suggests a serious question of this conclusion. There are many to-day who hold that the prosperity of Cuba was founded upon slave labour; that from the industrial viewpoint Cuba without slavery— which, it must be remembered, ended little more than a dozen years ago-is still an experiment; that from the social and political viewpoint the islanders, taken as a community, have yet to prove their capacity for self-government and their right to rank with the free peoples of America.

There were no schools in Cuba till near the end of last century. In 1836, when the population was nearly a million, only nine thousand pupils were receiving instruction. In 1860 the municipalities of the island had two hundred and eightythree schools for white children, and just two for coloured, and the total attendance was no larger, in proportion to the population, than in 1836. In 1883 a report shows eight hundred and thirty-five schools, but their management is described as one of utter neglect, few teachers being paid their salaries, and sixty-seven schools being entirely vacant. There is no census of illiteracy in Cuba, but, of

course, it is practically universal among the negroes and quite general among the poorer whites. Enrique Varona, a Cuban deputy to the Cortes, stated in 1895 that seventy-six per cent of the population-meaning, presumably, the adult population-could neither read nor write; and his estimate is probably too low. Of another test of popular enlightenment-the relative proportion of legitimate and illegitimate births-we find no recent report. The percentages of forty years ago are given by Ballou :

Even allowing for the existence of slavery, the figures are sufficiently shocking. Both Spain and Cuba were to pay a terrible penalty for allowing successive generations to grow up under such conditions of savagery.

Negro slavery, as has been said, ended in Cuba in 1886, but it has left a deep and indelible mark upon the island's present and future.

Slavery in Cuba. It began almost with the Spanish oc

cupation, and by a curious anomaly its origin is traced to the sainted Las Casas. Seeing that the native Indians, a people neither accustomed to labour nor physically competent for it, were perishing in thousands under the lash of their taskmasters, Las Casas suggested, as an alternative, the importation of a limited number of African slaves. The suggestion, developed to an extent of which its author never dreamed, was destined to bring momentous results, and to stain the history of the new world with a crime to be expiated by the blood and tears of nations. Yet to stigmatize Las Casas