by behaving as if I believed it and pretending to give my property willingly, when the gun of your greed is at my head. I will not. I will resist, and you shall be compelled to take your booty by force, that the world may know you are a bloody villain, not a pious saint.

The point is this. Our lie compelled Spain to refuse our demands and to fight instead. If she had yielded to these demands, with our background motives in sight, it would have been criminal. This is not rhetoric. In declaring war Congress and McKinley said, The object of this war is to free oppressed peoples, that is why Spain must give them up, we shall not take these peoples or their territory. If they had said instead of this, The purpose of the war is to make Porto Rico, the Philippines and perhaps Cuba our own, that is our true ultimate purpose (as it turns out it was), we never should have gotten those colonies without a world war. Europe would have forbidden us, and if England had said go on, the continent of Europe would have fought England and us. Spain knew this. Spain knew that we were picking her pockets by chloroforming Europe with a lie; tearing away that lie, our work was merely brutal robbery, to be resisted by any honest nation. Hence she fought us under compulsion of duty, as a man would fight a burglar in his house at night. If the burglar said, I am a clergyman and you must not fight me but give up your jewels without resisting, it would still be the victim's duty to fight. If there were neighbors, which should they help, the householder or the clergyman thief? Congress was shrewder than the clergyman-burglar. It dressed up as half priest, half politician, and entered Spain's domain and fell upon her. When the neighbors heard Spain's cries for help and ran in, we showed them our clothes and said, This woman has stolen and misused property and we are here to restore it to its rightful owner. Poor Spain saw the devil underneath our false garments and

tried to show the others, but failed, and after they were gone we knocked her senseless and made off with all that she had.

The whole trouble was Spain's brightness. She saw through us. She knew she was dealing with a thief and murderer. She knew we would do as we have done. If the devil had not been in us all would have been different, she would not have seen it under our priestly police robe; our acts would not have been those of an excited robber, getting his plunder or killing its owner. It would not have been difficult to secure the 'freedom and independence of Cuba' but for the very obvious devil in us. Spain would have imagined the devil anyway, some think. That is begging the question. The devil was there and we could not help showing it. If it had not been there we should not have shown it, and time would have convinced.

But above all, our letting the devil in us out this time entirely establishes the right of Spain's course in treating us as if we were a devil and fighting us, and it destroys our privilege to play clergyman or policeman again. We perhaps shall not wish to. Maybe we can carry on the devil's work we have begun in the devil's own jacket. Be this as it may we shall have to do so, for it is now known to the world that there is no saint anywhere in

us.

There is this proviso, already suggested. The American people only permitted the war as one for honest freedom, they did not sanction or enter it as a war for spoils, it is therefore an open question still how much the devil is in the American character, and how much confined to the American masters. In the first round the masters won unequivocally. For there is no question that the people were not devil enough either to have gone deliberately to rob Spain or to wage a war which they knew would become one of plunder. The clergyman's surplice on congress deceived the American people as well as the

powers of Europe. So far the whole people stand before the world as sheer devil because they have not repudiated and undone the work which a devil congress and president perpetrated in their name. If they do not undo it mankind will know that devil was ingrained in the American character, and that the momentary rulers only initiated a work which brought that latent devilishness into fierce and fractious play.

CHAPTER VIII.

The Pay of These Barnacles.

The politician lives on campaign funds and offices. War opened a vast field for transaction in offices, expansion will provide enormous campaign funds. Every appointment to office secures all the friends and relatives of the appointee as workers for the politician or administration conferring the plum. The Spanish war rained plums in torrents and the heavens are not yet dry. The selection of incompetents from civil life to fill war offices for political reasons has been a supreme scandal, not only in itself as a bribe from politicians to civilians to dance around their bloody bonfire, but because it caused that cruel slaughter of American young men in the politicianmade grave yards called camps of San Francisco and the South. Through Alger and Corbin, McKinley conducted a wholesale business of appointing incompetents. Under galling criticism he acknowledged his wrong-doing by a curious act, but did not repent. While Congress was in session he was obliged to send the names of his favorites to the senate for confirmation before they could receive commissions, but "soon after the close of the session he isued an order that the clerical force at the White House should not divulge the names of future appointees to the army from civil life." After this through inadvertency of a clerk the War Department allowed one list to leak out to the Associated Press and it was published by the evening papers of the country, but the excited Depart

*

ment secured its withholding from the morning papers." Thus do presidents and secretaries engaged in the great work of re-electing themselves sneak and scheme.

The number of civilians who received staff appointments up till August 22, '98, tells much. Assistant Adjutant-Generals, ranking as Major, 8; the same ranking as Captain, 35; Quartermaster ranked as LieutenantColonel, 1; the same, with rank of Major, 1; Chief Quartermasters, with rank of Major, 6; Assistant Quartermasters, ranking as Captain, 70; Chief Commissaries of Subsistence, ranking Major, 14; Commissaries of Subsistence, ranking Major, 5; the same, with rank of Captain, 73. This list is only partial, but many of those included are brothers and sons of present Washington politicians.

The result was death to the wretched men who took congress seriously in its declaration that the war was for humanity and not greed. How many of those who enlisted to make Cuba ‘free and independent' would have done so had the bed-rock object of the war, to forcibly obtain trading grounds for our millionaires, been confessed? Who can ever forgive that Congress? Innocent common citizens took the humanity gag seriously and went out to spend the summer rotting to death on foul and meagre rations within sight of home, under the care of the inefficient officers appointed to re-elect Congress and McKinley. This is one item of the pay given these scoundrels by the American people for immersing them in a criminal war.

When the war broke loose the volunteers from Southern California went up to camp in San Francisco on the bleak ocean front and found no preparation of food, bedding or clothing for them. The sickness began at once. On May 13, “There is not a man in the 584 raw recruits of the artillery battalion who has not a cold or a sore

*Washington correspondent of N. Y. Evening Post, Sept. 17. 1898. †The same.