been easily suppressed. But the repeated successes of the rebels enraged the Spaniards against Campos, and when he absolutely refused to sanction the execution of prisoners of war taken on the field, he was forced to resign in order to allay the popular feeling of the loyalists in the island. All Spaniards who go to Cuba join the volunteer organisation in order to escape conscription and enforced military service in the Peninsula, and thus the Spanish element, chiefly composed of carters, labourers, porters, and keepers of the bodegas, or street-corner liquor and grocery stores, forms an armed political body of ignorant intransigeants who despise everything Cuban and dominate the entire politics of the colony. This mob, for the organisation is little better, is 40,000 strong in Havana alone, and their bloody acts have been numerous, including the shooting down of men, women, and children in the Villanueva Theatre in a play that touched on Cuban sentiment, and the "Massacre of the Innocents," when, for a supposed grievance against the Havana Medical College, a Cuban institution, they demanded blood, and were only appeased by a general lottery among the students, the seventeen innocent youths who drew blanks being dragged off as scapegoats and shot down on the Prado. Not one of those young martyrs had attained his eighteenth year, and though the Governor-General tried to save them, he soon realised that such action would but precipitate a general massacre. These are the loyal Spaniards who have absolutely controlled Cuba for a number of years. Campos resigned to prevent an outbreak, and these uniformed brutes had sworn to kill him before he left because he dared to oppose their wishes. There were but two men in Spain to satisfy them when Campos leftWeyler and Polavieja. The former was the more cruel, and though he was known to be a Republican, and was only General of Cataluna, he was appointed Captain-General of Cuba.

Until this date the revolution had remained mainly in the hands of "Orientals," the inhabitants of eastern Cuba, and the educated and better class Cabans, while sympathising with the cause, had not actively participated in the rebellion. Captain-General Weyler made no attempt to conceal his feelings and intentions. Speaking at his reception on landing in Havana, he raised his thin gloved hand, and stated that he came there to make war, a pitiless war, on Spain's enemies, who would find that his hand was gloved with steel, and he promised also to speedily pacify the Cubans. His now historic reconcentracion decree, which was published October 21, 1896, and the brutality with which it was enforced, spelt the absolute loss of Cuba to Spain, and the addition of a further revolting chapter to her history, already sullied by the deeds of Torquemada, Alva, and more modern prototypes. Under its principal clauses all the inhabitants of the country districts were given eight days to abandon their homes and come into the fortified towns and cities. All individuals found outside

the lines after that date would be treated as rebels, irrespective of age or sex-in other words, would be killed at sight. All transport of food from the towns was forbidden, and an offer was made to the insurgents to surrender within the eight days of grace. When this prescribed period had expired, the entire country was to be laid waste with the view of starving out the rebels. It was the turning point of the struggle. Every Cuban then had to decide. Cuba or Spain. Which? To go to the towns meant starvation to all, and compulsory military service for the men. The days of grace expired almost before the people realised the order; but, like an angry dog let loose, Weyler then led 16,000 troops to start the "pacification" of Cuba. Starting in Pinar del Rio the columns began looting, burning, and devastating the country, and slaying the unfortunate wretches that fell into their hands. It was the people's awakening. Sorrowfully the women and children relinquished their homes and went to the towns, the men drove their cattle before them, and joined their insurgent brothers in the hills. Thus at the outset Weyler forced the best blood of the island and unlimited food supplies into the hands of the insurgents, and thousands of Cubans, who would have continued on their farms with some semblance of loyalty to Spain, were turned into bitter enemies by the confiscation of their homes and property and the separation of their families. Like a consuming fire Weyler's hordes advanced, leaving a blackened desert in their trail, as he led his men from one province to another, proclaiming each in succession "pacified." His guerilla, or irregulars, had full play, hunting out and murdering the miserable fugitives who had taken refuge in the woods after remaining in their homes until the last. Reliable authorities assert that over two thousand innocent persons were thus killed in Pinar del Rio alone during the pacifying process; but if this number is exaggerated, there is positive proof that many hundreds of terrorstricken rustics perished at the hands of the brutal soldiery. The insurgent army, though so greatly strengthened in numbers, were awaiting fresh supplies of arms and ammunition, and could not attack the large Spanish army. They remained in their retreats or dodged the columns until the force passed on, when they returned to the open country that the Captain-General had officially reported as subdued. Weyler's paper campaign against the insurgents affords a curious study of Spanish methods. His men were too busy looting to fight the insurgents, unless a conflict was unavoidable, and when the subjugation was completed to the Great Trocha there were four times as many rebels as when this campaign was started. It was then no longer a revolution, but a civil war, race against race.

The provinces laid waste were Pinar del Rio, Havana, Matanzas, and Santa Clara. It was in the north of the last province that I personally witnessed the barbarity of Weyler's orders. In Sagua la

Grande the irregulars under Colonel Benito Carrera, guided by negro desperadoes, who knew every inch of the country, routed out the people, using bloodhounds to track down fugitives, and outraging women and girls even to death. The scenes of the Indian Mutiny and the revolting acts of the Sepoys were equalled by Carrera's men. This officer himself brutally tortured prisoners by tearing off their nails to make them reveal the hiding place of other unfortunates, and on the outskirts of Sagua city he cut down a cripple lad who made a spirited answer to the interrogation of his mother. Several official protests against this monster were made by Colonel Barker, the United States consul at Sagua, though his reports, in common with the statements of other consuls in Cuba, were not published by the State Department, and he was warned from Washington not to utter for publication anything that would cause bad feeling against Spain and endanger Americans in the island. For helping starving Cubans the Colonel has twice had to barricade his house and wait, Winchester in hand, while a mob of volunteers debated on the advisability of burning out the Yankee.

Meanwhile the thousands of homeless people who were now crowded into the towns built themselves crazy shelters on any piece of waste ground. The better class had money, and a few were able to find a refuge in the United States. With the country a desert in which the towns stood as oases, food was soon at famine prices, and the truth dawned upon these people that their homes had been ruthlessly destroyed and their crops burnt without a single provision being made for their subsistence. Private charity did a little, but starvation soon appeared, and in a few weeks it was general. The pen fails to describe the horrible scenes to be witnessed in these settlements-four or five thousand women and children and a few old men dumped down to exist as best they might in the outskirts of a city enclosed in a barricade of barbed wire, with forts at frequent intervals past which no one could venture on pain of death. Without the commonest sanitary measures, they existed, and some are still existing the wives and children of once wealthy farmers and plantershuddled in with the negroes who once worked on their estates. Their food was the refuse from the swish tubs and scrapings from the gutters, and it is marvellous how long life can be sustained on these morsels. Even in Havana city, where they can beg in the streets, and where food was never scarce among the residents as in less favoured towns, I have seen children lick the blood off the stones at the shambles, and all the inhabitants of Los Fossos that had strength to crawl hastened one day to the beach to fight over the putrid carcase of a cow that was washed ashore. Those that procured chunks ate this meat raw, and this in sight of the Prado, Havana's fashionable quarter, where high officers live in luxury while bodies of starved victims are

picked up on the benches below every day. Most of these settlements are alike. Rows of palm-leaf huts with skin-clothed skeletons laying on a heap of rags on the muddy floor. Babies, hideous mockeries of childhood, lie dying on the breast from which all sustenance has dried, their little bodies covered with a loathsome skin disease, which attacks old and young alike. Young girls, once beautiful, without the clothing demanded by decency, lie on the bare floor moaning with the pangs of hunger. They have probably had the alternative of another fate; for an abominable traffic in mere children has been carried on openly, the girls usually being taken through misrepresentation to houses of ill-fame in the cities, many passing from Havana to Mexico, and points further south, before they become aware of their cruel position, while others enter the life with their eyes open, accepting their fate as inevitable. In some huts one or two bodies are sure to be found, the relatives crying over the worn out corpse of the dear one, so happily released from further suffering, and awaiting the advent of the dead cart on its gruesome rounds. Over all is a sickening smell of disease and death, while shrieks and curses of crazed victims raving in delirium and the general wails of hunger add to the horrors of the scene. In January of 1897, when I first visited these settlements, they were comparatively full, but in the October following there was a shocking difference, a miserable remnant alone remaining. The numbers of those who perished through starvation up to January 31 of this year have been estimated by various authorities with widely divergent results, one report stating that over 600,000 had perished. This I think is an exaggeration, but after personal visits to all the settlements of importance in the island, and careful inquiry into official statistics, especially the church registers, which record only those bodies buried in consecrated ground, I estimate that at least 400,000 miserable wretches have died of starvation and disease through the reconcentracion, and that 100,000 more must die under any circumstances. The consular reports to the United States do not deal with the many small interior towns, places of 500 inhabitants and an ingenio or sugar mill, where the people are chiefly employed. Into single settlements like these, especially in Matanzas and Santa Clara Provinces, 3000 homeless people have been penned up to die without causing attention. With the tons of food recently shipped from the United States, the -supply has been insufficient to relieve even those starving in the seaports.

During the great loot the Spanish soldiers lived on the fat of the land, but they destroyed each day what they did not eat, and no attempt was made to store the produce of the farms or send it into the cities. Even the cattle they captured were slaughtered on the spot to prevent the insurgents getting them, and by April of 1897

the stock was practically extinct. The Spanish officers during this time had been appropriating the ration money, and when the country was used up the sufferings of the soldiers commenced. Those doing detached duty in the wooden fortinas in the barricades depended mainly on roots growing in the near vicinity, for sweet potatoes and other succulent tubere are always to be found in the interior. The line battalions existed on rice and biscuit; but insufficient food so reduced the unacclimatised boys that fever made terrible ravages among them. The medical department was faulty, and there being no transport, thousands died before they could be sent to Havana hospitals. Where one soldier has been killed in battle, nine have died of fever, chiefly from a malaria not fatal under ordinary conditions. Most of the yellow fever is contracted in hospital in Havana. There the immense Regla sugar warehouses have been improvised into sick wards, where the fever stricken patients are placed on the very edge of the death ditch-Havana Harbour. Without direct current or proper outlets, ten feet of sewage reposes on this harbour bed, its noxious fumes spreading Yellow Jack for miles around, and making Cuba a place to be dreaded. The expenditure of a few thousand dollars would cut a canal through the narrow neck of land to the sea, and cause a direct flow of water that would save hundreds of lives by its cleansing powers.

Spain has sent over 200,000 men across the sea, and with 60,000 volunteers and the bands of guerilla General Weyler had 300,000 well-armed men at his disposition. The Cubans have never had more than 25,000 armed men in the field to meet this vast horde, and while the bulk of Weyler's forces were kept in the west, more than half the Cabans were in the eastern provinces. It seems incredible that in the narrow and open province of Havana the rebels have constantly operated right at the doors of the capital, and make weekly raids into the suburbs of the city. A glance at the soldiers of Spain will explain the absolute failure of the Imperialists. Raw country lads, torn unwillingly from their homes in sunny Spain and shipped to Cuba after ten days' drill, form the bulk of the army. Clad in a striped calico suit totally unsuitable for a tropical climate, shod in canvas shoes with hemp soles that let in the water and go to pieces after a few miles march, and armed with a complicated Mauser rifle of which he knows nothing, the recruit is rushed to the front. Transport being lacking, each soldier is weighted down with four heavy pouches of ammunition, beside his blanket, personal kit and as much "hard tack" as he can stuff under his tunic. Naturally, in the tropical heat, the troops can barely crawl, and are quite useless aз a fighting machine. Massed in heavy columns, their tactics consist of marching aimlessly across the open country. During the devastation they formed heavy flanks while some companies did the looting.