seconded him in the Colony. They denounced the cancer of slavery, the horrors of the traffic in slaves, the corruption of the office-holders, the abuses of the government, the discontent of the people with their forced state of political tutelage. No attention was given to them, and this brought on the first armed conflicts. Before the formidable insurrection of 1868, which lasted ten years, the reform party, which included the most enlightened, wealthy and influential Cubans, exhausted all the resources within their reach to induce Spain to initiate a healthy change in the Cuban policy. The party started the publication of periodicals in Madrid and in the Island, addressed petitions, maintained a great agitation throughout the country, and having succeeded in leading the Spanish Govern. ment to make an inquiry into the economical, political and social condition of Cuba, they presented a complete plan of government which satisfied public requirements as well as the aspirations of the people. The Spanish Government disdainfully cast aside the proposition as useless, increased taxation, and proceeded to its exaction with extreme severity. Outbreak of the Long War. It was then that the ten-year war broke out. Cuba, almost a pigmy compared with Spain, fought like a giant. Blood ran in torrents. Public wealth disappeared in a bottomless abyss. Spain lost 200,000 men. Whole districts of Cuba were left almost entirely without their male population. Seven hundred millions were spent to feed that conflagration-a conflagration that tested Cuban heroism, but which could not touch the hardened heart of Spain. The latter could not subdue the bleeding Colony, which had no longer strength to prolong the struggle with any prospect of success. Spain proposed a compact, which was a snare and a deceit. She granted to Cuba the liberties of Puerto Rico, which enjoyed none. On this deceitful ground was laid the new situation, throughout which has run a current of falsehood and hypocrisy. Spain, whose mind had not changed, hastened to change the name of things. The Captain General was called Governor General. The royal decrees took the name of authorizations. The commercial monopoly of Spain was named coasting trade. The right of banishment was transformed into the law of vagrancy. The abolition of constitutional guarantees became the law of public order Taxation without the consent or knowledge of the Cuban people was changed into the law of estimates (budget) voted by the representatives of Spain, that is, of European Spain. The painful lesson of the ten-year war had been entirely lost on Spain. Instead of inaugurating a redeeming policy that would heal the recent wounds, allay public anxiety, and quench the thirst for justice felt by the people, who were desirous to enjoy their natural rights, the Spanish Government, while lavish in promises of reform, persisted in carrying on unchanged its old and crafty system, the groundwork of which continues to be the same, namely: To exclude every native Cuban from every office that could give him any effective influence and intervention in public affairs; the ungovernable exploitation of the colonists' labor for the benefit of Spanish commerce and Spanish bureaucracy, both civil and military. To carry out the latter purpose it was necessary to maintain the former at any cost. Systematic Robbery of Cuba. What use the Spanish Government has made of its power is apparent in the threefold spoliation to which it has submitted the Island of Cuba. Spain has not, in fact, a colonial policy. In the distant lands she has subdued by force, Spain has sought nothing but. immediate riches, and these it has wrung by might from the compulsory labor of the natives. For this reason Spain to-day in Cuba is only a parasite. Spain robs the Island of Cuba through its fisca. regime, through its commercial regime and through its bureaucratic regime. These are the three forms of official spoliation; but they are not the only forms of spoliation. When the war of 1878 came to an end, two-thirds of the Island were completely ruined. The other third, the population of which had remained peaceful, was abundantly productive; but it had to face the great economical change involved in the impending abolition of slavery. Slavery had received its death-blow at the hands of the insurrection, and Cuban insurrectionists succeeded at the close of the war in securing its eventual abolition. · Evidently it would have been a wholesome and provident policy to lighten the fiscal burdens of a country in such a condition. Spain was only bent on making Cuba pay the cost of the war. The Government overwhelmed the Colony with enormous budgets, reaching as high a figure as forty-six million dollars, and this only to cover the obligations of the State; or, rather, to fill up the unfathomable gulf left by the wastefulness and plunder of the civil and military administration during the years of war, and to meet the expenses of the military occupation of the country. Oppressive Taxation. The economical organization of Cuba is of the simplest kind. It produces to expoit, and imports almost everything it consumes. In view of this, it is evident that all Cuba required from the State was that it should not hamper its work with excessive burdens, nor hinder its commercial relations; so that it could buy cheap where it suited her, and sell her products with profit. Spain has done all the contrary. She has treated the tobacco as an enemy; she has loaded the sugar with excessive imposts; she has shackled with excessive and abusive excise duties the cattleraising industry; and with her legislative doings and undoings she has thrown obstacles in the way of the mining industry. And, to cap the climax, she has tightly bound Cuba in the network of a monstrous tariff and a commereial legislation which subjects the Colony, at the end of the nineteenth century, to the ruinous monopoly of the producers and merchants of certain regions of Spain, as in the halcyon days of the colonial compact. If Spain were a flourishing industrial country, and produced the principal articles required by Cuba for the consumption of its people, or for developing and fostering its industries, the evil, although always great, would be a lesser one. But everybody knows the backwardness of the Spanish industries, and the inability of Spain to |