68. Bert S. Skiller, arrested at La Caleta, in open boat, April 23, 1896; released at Baracoa September 3, 1896.

69. Manuel Comas, arrested October 25, 1835, and released.

70. Alfred Laborde, native; arrested on steamer Competitor April 25, 1896; charge, landing arms for insurgents; confined in Cabana fortress; condemned to death May 8; order suspended; new trial opened May 11, 1896.

71. William Gildea, naturalized; same as above.

72. Ona Melton, native; same as above.

73. Charles Barnett, native; supposed to be one of Competitor crew; captured on land; same as above.

74. William Leavitt, British subject; supposed to be one of Competitor crew; captured on land; same as above.

List of newspaper war correspondents who have been expelled from the island. William Mannix. native of United States; expelled as a dangerous alien, etc., February 11, 1896.

Sylvester Scovel, World, native of United States; reported that he had arrived from insurgent lines, and it was intended to deport him in January; reported January 20 that he had returned to insurgent lines.

Charles Michelson and Lorenzo Betancourt, correspondent and interpreter of New York Journal; arrested February 25; confined in Morro Castle; released February 27, 1896; charged with having communicated with insurgents by passing through Spanish lines at Marianco, etc.

Elbert Rappleye, Mail and Express; expelled March 28, 1896, for sending news to his paper which was false and disparaging to the authorities in the island.

James Creelman, World, born in Canada; expelled May 5, 1896, for sending to paper false reports touching the insurrection.

F. W. Lawrence, Journal, born in the United States; expelled May 5, 1896; same cause as above.

William G. Gay, World, native of New York; expelled June 27; went to New York.

Thomas J. Dawley, war correspondent, native of New York; arrested several times between March 24, 1896, and July 3, on suspicion; charges, "taking views of forts and conspiring to blow up same with dynamite;" confined thirteen days in Morro; released.

April 8, 1897.

Mr. MORGAN. I move that the Senate proceed to the consideration of the joint resolution (S. R. 26) declaring that a condition of public war exists in Cuba, and that strict neutrality shall be maintained.

The VICE-PRESIDENT. Is there objection to the present consideration of the joint resolution indicated by the Senator from Alabama?

There being no objection, the Senate, as in Committee of the Whole, resumed the consideration of the joint resolution.

Mr. MORGAN. Mr. President, when I left the floor yesterday, at the hour of 2 o'clock, I had asked leave to put in the RECORD the message of the President of the United States showing the number of Americans who were imprisoned in the Island of Cuba during the present war and the disposition that had been made of them. That record shows that seventy-four American citizens were imprisoned. The Senator from Maine [Mr. HALE] says that he finds on inquiry at the State Department that only twelve of those prisoners are now retained in confinement and subject to the prosecutions which have been instituted against them in Cuba. That is an act of clemency on the part of Spain which I suppose we ought to be very grateful for, inasmuch as it has been obtained chiefly by supplication on the part of the United States. I think perhaps we ought to strengthen the future prayers of our Administration by passing some sort of recognition of the fact that we are greatly indebted to the Spanish Government for not having slain outright all of those American citizens.

Some of them were condemned to death; some of them are still on trial for alleged capital offenses; all of them are held amenable to the military laws of Spain in Cuba. More particularly amongst that oppressed class are the crew of the Competitor, to which I shall presently devote some attention, and I will speak with respect to those prisoners upon testimony which has been given before a committee of the Senate, on oath, by witnesses who were present at the former trial of the parties.

I notice also a list of newspaper correspondents who have been expelled from the island: William Mannix, a native of the United States; Sylvester Scovel, a native of the United States; Charles Michelson, whose nativity is not given; Lorenza Bentancourt; Elbert Rappleye, of the Mail and Express paper (his nativity is not given); James Creelman, of the World, born in Canada; F. W. Lawrence, of the Journal, born in the United States; William G. Gay, of the World, a native of New York; Thomas J. Dawley, war correspondent, a native of New York.

So bitter is the resentment of Spain toward the United States for not having come out and proclaimed an alliance with her for the purpose of crushing out her Cuban subjects that it is with the utmost degree of exasperation she regards any person who claims to be an American and goes into that island for the purpose of obtaining information.

The accusations upon which these different correspondents were removed from Cuba are that they were guilty of false statements with regard to the war and the cruelties inflicted upon private persons and upon soldiers captured in arms during the present struggle.

Mr. President, it seems very strange if among all the correspondents the papers of the United States have sent to Cuba they could find no man who has sufficient personal character and sufficient standing in the estimation of the people of the United States to be credited in respect to statements he might make for publication here, and it does seem strange that not one of them has escaped the imputation on the part of the Spanish people and Government that he was making false reports about the condition of affairs in Cuba.

We have passed through the period of three revolutions in Cuba-one twenty years ago that lasted for ten years. A more bloody, bitter, and unrelenting struggle was never waged by human hands against mortality than that. We then had correspondents there. The history of that war and of its incidents has been completed. All the civilized world has books that contain a full statement of the transactions of that war. Its truths have stained Spanish history with indelible reproach. The Spanish Government has never been able to contradict that record. So in regard to the record made by our newspaper correspondents, every one of whom has been expelled that I have heard of who went there. The Spanish Government has entered no defense in the nature of a contradiction of the specific statements that they have made, but has banished them from that country and refused them admission there again, upon the ground that they had written false reports of transactions in Cuba.

My mind continually recurs to the treaty of 1795 when I think of an American citizen and his rights in the Island of Cuba. These men have the right to go there, pushing their enterprise of gathering news and reporting it to the world. It is not only a lucrative profession, but honorable, and one to which the world is

greatly indebted every day that we exist. If the daily newspaper press of the world was silent; if a band of "incomunicado "could be interposed between the people and the newspaper press, so that their utterances should not reach the people, no other cause of dissatisfaction would be more provocative of wrath than that; no privation would be considered equal to that in its distressful exactions upon human patience.

The newspaper press of the world must necessarily get some inaccurate ideas. In the vast mass of information that it sends over the postal lines and along the telegraph wires and across the oceans on cables it must necessarily fall into error about many things. Sometimes in their enterprise they anticipate things and conjecture things, almost undertake to prophesy about matters that are coming to the front in the future, and make mistakes. But, sir, when you look over the statements made last month or the month before in the great newspaper press of the world and get the consensus of opinion and statements that the various papers have made, you have a volume of history collected that no iman will ever be able to expunge. It is history founded on the facts; it is history that reveals the truth. "What they hit is history; what they miss is mystery."

Here, then, is Spain accused by these men whom she has banished from the Island of Cuba on account of particular statements of transactions, giving names and date and locality, and no man, not even the Spanish press, has ventured to deny what these newspaper agents of the United States have published broadcast here for the last two years. I have never seen one important statement denied about them except some conjectures in regard to the manner of the death of Maceo; and yet the circumstances attending that transaction were of so peculiar a character that we could scarcely blame any man for conjecturing that Maceo had been entrapped into an ambuscade and had been slain through treachery. Now, rated at what it is worth, rated according to its proper place in history, with all this mass of newspaper testimony piled up against Spain during the last two years, and with the great mass of information that the world possesses in regard to the same war (for it is the same war that was waged twenty years ago), it is idle for any man in this country to attempt to deny that war exists in Cuba or that it is prosecuted under circumstances, conditions, and with surroundings which violate every possible conception in the mind of a civilized man as to what war ought to be and what civilized war is.

I think, Mr. President, that there ought to be an end to the question and an end to debate upon the question as to whether war exists in Cuba. There is but one country in the world which denies it outside of Spain, and that is the United States of America. And yet in all of the correspondence of our consuls and consulsgeneral, in the messages which have been sent to us by the President of the United States, the confession of war is openly and frequently made. The struggle in Cuba is not spoken of by any official of the United States in any other light than that war exists in Cuba. When the pivotal point of our own action turns on that proposition and no other, when the only question the Senate has to consider in respect to the joint resolution now before it is whether war exists in Cuba, I think I should be spared the necessity of inflicting upon the Senate any debate or argument to prove a fact known to every man, woman, and child in the world who has any acquaintance at all with public affairs and general history.

When a fact so important as this, the turning point in the rights of our people, is stated upon the floor of the Senate, it is a shame that we can not get this body, the House of Representatives, and the President to come out and acknowledge the fact, proclaim the truth, and let the truth have its own logical effect and consequence.

I was reading this morning a note from Mr. Dupuy de Lôme, addressed to Miss Clara Barton. Miss Clara Barton desired to go to Cuba with the Red Cross for the purpose of relieving the distresses among the people of that island in consequence of the war. Mr. Dupuy de Lôme, in replying to that-it is a very late day at which this reply comes, however, as I can show by the records here-says:

I duly communicated to my Government the proposition made by you to go to Cuba with a view of conveying the aid of the American people to the sufferers in consequence of the war.

The Spanish minister, with all of his diplomatic cunning and reserve, in writing to this splendid woman about the great benevolence which she is conducting, is unable to keep from the tip of his pen, or out of his mouth, or out of his thought the words which so thoroughly describe the truth of the situation in Cuba, "in consequence of the war," in which he confesses that there are "sufferers. If De Lôme can say it is a war, why can we not say so? Why do we refuse to say so? Because, Mr. President, the very moment we make that declaration, the laws of war as regulated by the laws of nations apply there, and the punishment of men for insurrection under municipal orders, decrees, and legislation

at once ceases.

Mr. GALLINGER. Will the Senator permit me? Is that a recent utterance of the Spanish minister? It escaped my attention. Mr. MORGAN. Yes, sir; it is printed in the Times of February 12 of the present year.

Mr. GALLINGER. Only a month or two ago?

Mr. MORGAN. Yes. When the consequences of the declaration of the existence of a war in Cuba are so very important, if you please, to the twelve prisoners who remain there, so important to all of the citizens of the United States who are there and who have property there, so important to our commerce and to everything connected with it, it does seem strange that in the presence of these facts we can not get our consent to make the declaration, in a form that gives to it the effect and power of a law in this country, that a state of war exists in Cuba.

Now, sir, if a state of war has existed in Cuba and the seventyfour prisoners whose names are given to us by the President had been arrested there as being persons who were in complicity with the enemy or as prisoners captured out of the armies controverting with each other upon the field of battle, instead of these men being carried before the secret, inquisitorial tribunals which I described yesterday, and instead of being tried by summary military proceedings in court-martial, they would have been confined in camps with all of the rights and privileges and guaranties of protection, of maintenance, and of the proper treatment that belongs to the character of a prisoner of war.

On yesterday I read from the elementary authors a definition of the rights and privileges of a prisoner of war. To the prisoners who are in Cuba now, and those who have been there, some of whom have suffered indescribable torture for two years in the foul prisons of Habana and other prisons in Cuba, what a great

relief and happiness it would have been if a state of war had been recognized as existing in Cuba, and they, instead of being captured and confined as violators of civil duties toward Spain, had been amenable to no other confinement and no other punishment than that which is due to the character of a prisoner of war!

Mr. President, that is all in the past except as to the twelve men who are there yet, but the wound upon the honor of the United States Government is not in the past. That is an open, fresh, and bleeding wound at this moment, for the wounded honor of a nation does not heal because the occasion is past or because of the possibility of making reclamation in the form of monetary compensation or damages at some future period. The duty that the Government of the United States owes to its own citizenship is one that every American is proud to recognize and proud to claim. Would to God that the United States Government was equally proud to stand up and bestow its protection and defense! But that, it seems, is not the case.

If the individual suffering of the seventy-four men and that of their families could be laid before the Senate to-day, if the history of those men who have been incarcerated in the prisons of Cuba could be revealed to the Senate, it would perhaps show an extent of suffering which would arouse the indignation of every human being in the United States. Suppose instead of being seventy-four there had been only one. Suppose that only one American citizen had been treated in the manner these prisoners have been treated; who can say that the Government of the United States can enjoy the reasonable respect and confidence of its own citizens if it stands by and sees one man suffer at the hands of the Spanish Government, or any other government in the world, when the suffering is inflicted contrary to treaty, contrary to international law, and contrary to the sacred rights of humanity?

I hope, sir, that we are not in that miserable and low and mean condition where our citizens ought to be ashamed of us because we have not the strength of character and will to reach out the hand of justice and demand rights that belong to our people. That is all that I am claiming; but I do claim that, and will continue to do it.

In order to give a little more emphasis and make a better foundation for the remarks and characterizations that I have been compelled to employ in this debate, and that I employ reluctantly when speaking of any foreign government, let me read some statements from the last annual message of the President of the United States.

President Cleveland, in sending in his last annual message, adopted a paper which he sent in with it, a report prepared by the Secretary of State, so that the message, of course, and the report constitute but one paper. The President says, in speaking of the situation in Cuba:

It is to the same end that in pursuance of general orders Spanish garrisons are now being withdrawn from plantations and the rural population required to concentrate itself in the towns. The sure result would seem to be that the industrial value of the island is fast diminishing, and that unless there is a speedy and radical change in existing conditions it will soon disappear altogether. That value consists very largely, of course, in its capacity to produce sugar-a capacity already much reduced by the interruptions to tillago which have taken place during the last two years. It is reliably asserted that should these interruptions continue during the current year and practically extend, as is now threatened, to the entire sugar-producing territory of the island, so much time and so much money will be required to restore the land to its normal productiveness that it is extremely doubtful if capital can be induced to even make the attempt.