THE WAR WITH SPAIN CHAPTER I THE UNSETTLED QUESTION THREE hundred and fifty years ago the empire of Charles V circled the globe, and was the greatest military and political power among civilized men. Of that mighty fabric, the year 1898 has witnessed the unlamented end. We of to-day have thus beheld the closing scene of one of the great dramas of history. The colonies planted in America by the English and the Dutch have risen to be a great nation, and that nation has finished the work begun by the followers of William of Orange, when, amid the dikes of Holland and upon the stormy waters of the English Channel, they struck at the power of Philip II even in its pitch of pride. Such events as these are not accidents, nor are they things of yesterday. The final expulsion of Spain from the Americans and from the Philippines is the fit conclusion of the long strife between the people who stood for civil and religious freedom, and those who stood for bigotry and tyranny as hideous in their action as any which have ever cursed humanity. The work has been a long one, but Spain at last is confined practically to her US. Vietnam THE WAR WITH SPAIN peninsula, where her people can do as they please with each other, but whence they can trouble the world no more. Spain has ceased to rule; her once vast empire has gone, because she has proved herself unfit to govern, and for the unfit among nations there is no pity in the relentless world-forces which shape the destinies of mankind. The irrepressible conflict between Spain on the one side and England and Holland on the other, after the former had been crippled in Europe, was transferred from the Old World to the New. They seemed at first very remote from each other in the vast regions of the American continents, but nevertheless the two opposing forces, the two irrevocably hostile systems, were always drawing steadily together, with the certainty that when they met one of them must go down before the other. The Seven Years' War drove France from eastern North America, and fixed forever the fate of that region. It was to be English, not French: The lilies withered where the lion trod. The expulsion of France not only removed the long standing northern peril to the English colonies, but swept away the last barrier between them and Spain. In the American Revolution, France, seeking her revenge for the conquests of Pitt, forced Spain to become her ally against England; but Spain had no love for the rebellious colonists. A treacherous, nominal friend, she tried to wrest advantage from their weakness, and to secure to herself in final possession the Mississippi valley and the great Northwest. Failing in this, she sought, after American independence had been won, by false and insolent diplomacy and by corrupting intrigues among the Western settlers, to check the American advance across the continent. It was all in vain. Through woodland and savanna, over mountain and stream, came the steady tramp of the American pioneer. He was an adventurer, but he was also a settler, and what he took he held. He carried a rifle in one hand, he bore an axe in the other, and where he camped he made a clearing and built a home. The two inevitable antagonists were nearing each other at last, for they were face to face now all along the western and southern borders of the United States. The time had come for one to stop, or for the other to give way. But there was no stopping possible to the Americans, and through the medium of French ownership the Louisiana purchase was made, the Mississippi became a river of the United States, and their possessions were stretched across the continent even to the slopes of the Rocky Mountains. Still not content, the Americans pressed upon the southern boundary until, in 1819, they forced Spain, in order to avoid war, to sell them Florida and the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico as far as Louisiana. Meantime, inspired by the example of the United States in rejecting foreign dominion, and borne forward by the great democratic movement which, originating in America, had swept over Europe, the Spanish colonies rose in arms and drove Spain from Central and South America. A few years passed by, and then the restless American advance pressed on into Texas, took it from Mexico, and a territory larger than any European state except Russia was added to the United States. Still the American march went on, and then war came with Mexico, and another vast region, stretching from Oregon to Arizona, became an American possession. All the lands of North America which had once called Spain master, which Cortez and De Soto, Ponce de Leon and Coronado, had bestowed upon the Spanish crown, had passed from the hands of the men who could not use them into those of the men who could. The expulsion of Spain from the Antilles is merely the last and final step of the inexorable movement in which the United States has been engaged for nearly a century. By influence and example, or more directly by arms and by the pressure of ever-advancing settlements, the United States drove Spain from all her continental possessions in the Western Hemisphere, until nothing was left to the successors of Charles and Philip but Cuba and Puerto Rico. How did it happen that this great movement, at once racial, political, and economic, governed as it was by forces which rule men even in their own despite-how did it happen to stop when it came to the ocean's edge? The movement against Spain was at once natural and organic, while the pause on the sea-coast was artificial and in contravention of the laws of political evolution in the Americas. The conditions in Cuba and Puerto Rico did not differ from those which had gone down in ruin wherever the flag of Spain waved upon the mainland. The Cubans desired freedom, and Bolivar would fain have gone to their aid. Mexico and Colombia, in 1825, planned to invade the island, and at that time invasion was sure to be successful. What power stayed the oncoming tide which had swept over a continent? Not |