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come out in the fleet and produced great havoc among the troopships, which were defenseless in the absence of an armed vessel."

The Heraldo of Madrid, August 22nd, 1898, published the report of Cervera. He says the Brooklyn was "on account of her speed the vessel most dreaded" and when the departure was effected, "we steered the pre-arranged course."

The Spanish Office of Naval Intelligence published the diary of Lieutenant Jose Muller y Tejeiro, second in command of Naval forces of the province of Santiago de Cuba.

"July 4. Opposite the mouth of the harbor, the New York, Brooklyn, Indiana, Massachusetts, Minneapolis, Vesuvius, one yacht and seventeen merchant vessels. At eight P. M. the cruiser Reina Mercedes started up. As the interior of the harbor did no longer have the safeguard of the fleet, as the Bustamente torpedoes (six of them) had been taken up so that the fleet could go out and had not yet been replaced, and as, finally, the first line of mines. no longer existed, the commander of marine decided-General Toral also being of his opinion-to sink the Mercedes (the only ship that was suitable for that purpose) in the narrow part of the channel; consequently the command of the cruiser received orders to do so."

The sinking of the Mercedes did not close the harbor. Here it appears the door was open to the helpless city, and Sampson, though the New York and Oregon were amply able to answer for the Colon, hastened to overtake the Colon, when the battle was over and lost the hours when he could have entered the harbor and placed the city under the guns of the fleet, compelling immediate and unconditional surrender.

The Mercedes was a damaged ship, the boilers given out and her effective guns sent ashore. The Atlantic Squadron had suspended over it the apprehensive home rule order that our war boats must not be risked. That was not so when Roosevelt was in the Navy Department.

"Dewey, Hong-Kong:

"Washington, February 25, 1898.

"Secret and confidential. Order the squadron, except Monocacy, to HongKong. Keep full of coal. In the event of declaration of war, Spain, your duty will be to see that the Spanish squadron does not leave the Asiatic coast, and then offensive operations in Philippine Islands. Keep Olympia until further orders. ROOSEVELT."

The President has helped Admiral Schley to justice in this: He has wiped out the vulgar imputations of cowardice, and the fabric of that sort of falsehood, and he has relieved Sampson as well as Schley from the coveted pinnacle of the command in chief in action. He has said little of matters of which it was unnecessary to speak. Fame is not a tender plant and is especially the growth not of official judgment, but of public opinion.

CHAPTER XXVII.

OUR COUNTRY'S GREAT HEREAFTER.

The Settled Issues--Burning Questions of the Future-After the Problems, the Premiership of the Nations Is Ours-The Competency of the President to Guide Us on the Way.

T

HERE have been evidences for a considerable number of years that the Republican party has taken up the reformation of Civil Service Reform, as one of the paramount issues before the country. A respectful reference, at least, to this, found its way into nearly all the platforms bearing the Republican stamp. It was regularly included to a great extent in the perfunctory paragraphs "relegated," as the Free Traders said, when they nominated Horace Greeley for the Presidency, "to Congress." This relegation was as clever a style of open indifference, and notice that while officially advertised, the doctrine that patronage was out of politics was not yet proclaimed as fundamental law, as could have been contrived. The author of "relegating" a convention's despair to Congress was one of the most obstinate free traders the country has produced; and he has been for a time in the habit of being driven into the Democratic party, as far as a gold Democrat could go under the inspiration and urgency of forcible organization.

It has been the binding band of the Republican party, that there is real and ever present danger the Democratic party will get into power, without the slightest regard for the policy it might adopt, the force of it being in the passion for the spoils to go to the victors. The most effective cry the Democracy has had has been, that the country needed a new set of booksrather of book-keepers; and the Grand Army of Administration to be subordinated to the party, and, therefore, to be enlarged by the extension of the functions of all Departments of the Government.

The Republican party has been unfortunate in the Southern States. It is not the fault of the party, but a fatality. If the color question could be removed, the South would be as solidly Republican as it is solidly Democratic. The South contains, in the everlasting hills and sunlit fields of North America, the elementary material for manufactures. Texas comes in with oil. Coal and iron ore are found, side by side, in extraordinary quantity and of excellent

quality, in the State of Alabama-the State whose name is always first called on the roll of the States in the National conventions. That form of premiership is, however, an alphabetic happening. There are also respects in which Alabama has other distinctions than those of alphabetical, mineral and agricultural resources, and beauty of name. What they are is signified to the country by the records of the venerable men, her United States Senators. Mr. Morgan is one of the foremost Americans in Americanism.

West Virginia has the coal to furnish the supply for all the lands once the seat of the Roman Empire, whose imperialists destroyed the forests all around the Mediterranean Sea; and it will be left to us at no remote day to carry on, out of our stupendous abundance, the coal trade that has been an English monopoly since London sought to rule all the seas. The English mines are too deep, and the Atlantic ocean too narrow for the British islands to continue to compete with us successfully. With ships of steel, with steam for donkey engines only, with freight that is not harmed by voyages, coal obtained from mines that deliver it on cars by the attraction of gravitation, we do not need to husband our fuel that is taken from the ground, out of merciful foresight reaching to many millenniums, for it can be only a few centuries before our inventors will burn water with electricity, or find our fuel exclusively in some of the elements of the atmosphere, or some equivalent miracle, and still there will be a coal and steel trade.

The States that were more or less interested in the Southern Confederacy, which was as great an economical as it was a political and military misapprehension, have a larger interest in the protection of American industry, "Protection and Reciprocity," as understood and announced by James G. Blaine and William McKinley, than New England, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The advocates of the policy of protecting our markets for our skilled laborers, they then to win markets abroad by the superiority of their products, now when Henry Clay's American policy is vindicated, have to encounter the consolidated opposition of the Southern South on account of the location of the bulk of the colored population. This should not be an inherent and perpetual obstruction when neither section is responsible for the slave immigration and black population, or willing to permit the dominance in any State of the black race. The absence of real danger of such an event prevents the question from passing from one of inner heat to outward conflagration.

The National element of the country, so far as embodied in the Republican party, was beguiled by the glittering and ponderous essays of experimental undertakings into the XVth Constitutional Amendment. Statesmanship instead of theory-the sunshine instead of the moonlight wisdom-would have counseled strict adherence to the XIVth Amendment, with its restricted apportionment, instead of forcing a complication of "manhood suffrage" unrestrained,

T. R.-23

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