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it was a time when party hatreds and rancour ran high and personal feeling and party ties actuated, unconsciously I have no doubt, but none the less truly and wrongfully, many judges in the land. Many of these sentences seemed too long, many absolutely unjust, and the bitterness which they engendered doomed to failure in advance all our plans for pacification. My rôle, you see, was to pacify, to assuage the angry passions that had been aroused. I think the results have justified my merciful action in almost every instance. The talk about half the men whom I have pardoned out being back in jail is simply an outrageous falsehood. I can only remember two instances of this, but I can remember fifty instances of men whom I pardoned and who, although they have only been at liberty a few months, have already rendered extremely valuable services to Cuba."

I take the liberty of giving this conversation in full because I think it answers very successfully the only substantial charge, in a shower of slander, that was brought against the provisional governor. I also give it because it discloses an intimate view of a very remarkable man who, under trying-almost intolerablecircumstances, showed administrative talents of a high order, which have not been generally appreciated.

The official bond that binds us to Cuba is the widely known but little understood Platt Amendment.* It is a very important piece of legislation, and yet wherever mentioned, whether in Washington or in Cuban official circles, there ensues a gravelike silence. I for one propose to break this conspiracy of silence, if such it be. It seems to me that, if not already too late, the time for frank speaking has come.

*The text of the Platt Amendment is given in Appendix A, Note II, page 404.

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The Platt Amendment is not only hated but held in abhorrence by the great majority of Cubans. It was only accepted and so became a part of their constitution and public law because their political leaders believed that our evacuation of the island would otherwise have been postponed. It was not accepted in good faith by the Cuban Congress and every attempt to disregard the spirit, if not the letter, of this law is praised as patriotic. At times I think it is as well to be emphatic. No man in public life to-day in Cuba would dare to openly approve the Platt Amendment as a fair and equitable adjustment of the peculiar relations that exist between the Cuban and the American people.

There is nothing to choose between the attitude of the liberal and conservative leaders in this regard. In politics, Menocal, who received his education, his early training, his start in life, everything that he possesses from the United States, is as anti-American as is Gomez or Zayas, who are more distinctly Latin types. This unhappy state of affairs is not due as some think to any constitutional want of character and reliability on the part of the Cuban people, but simply because they have been taught to believe by their natural leaders and teachers that the passage of the Platt Amendment by our Senate was a gross breach of faith which justifies any form of reprisal, open or covert.

Upon the stump and in the coffee-houses a noisy orator before a densely ignorant audience can ring very convincing changes upon this subject, and yet as a matter of fact the hated Amendment only puts into concrete form our attitude towards the island of Cuba which has been invariably maintained ever since Jefferson recognised that Cuba commanded the mouth of the

Mississippi and the entrance to our Gulf ports; that in consequence we could not remain indifferent to the condition of the island or to the form of government prevailing there.

Very openly Cuban politicians and Cuban journalists, almost, if not quite, without exception, charge the Government in Washington with a gross breach of all the generous promises which were made when the war with Spain was declared. For proof of their assertions they point to the Platt Amendment, and they can point to nothing else. Far from being, as the Cuban editors and demagogues claim, the clear proof of our bad faith, the Platt Amendment illustrates what the European foreign offices are generally pleased to describe as our quixotic disinterestedness in the whole Cuban imbroglio. In this important instrument the new conditions that have arisen and the rights derived from a costly war are not referred to, much less recognised and consecrated in treaty form. In the Platt Amendment there is nothing new, but there is set forth and described, more precisely than ever before, our attitude to the island as it was interpreted in the days of Spanish supremacy by Adams and by Everett, and in the days of the occupation by McKinley and by John Hay.

With the exception of the demand for the few acres of desert land around the Guantanamo naval station which our marines watered with their blood, shed freely in the liberation of Cuba, the Platt Amendment contains no demand or proviso that will not be found fully sustained and very formally incorporated in the famous Cuban correspondence of seventy-five years ago between Lord Malmesbury and Edward Everett. Our attitude, which political and geographical conditions impose upon

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