ll-nigh in sight of our shores, and we are paying very little heed to
the spectacle."

These words were written before the United States came to the rescue,
and the criticism in the last sentence is, thank Heaven, no longer
applicable. We are slow to act perhaps, but when we do act, our work is
effective, and we never rest until our aim is accomplished.

CHAPTER X.

THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY.

To enlarge upon the sufferings of the Cubans is a painful task, but it
is a task that must be accomplished, in the interests of justice and
humanity, and also that the reader may clearly understand why it was the
bounden duty of the United States to interfere.

Let us therefore proceed with the evidence.

Julian Hawthorne gives his testimony as follows:

"These people have starved in a land capable of supplying tens of
millions of people with abundant food. The very ground on which they lie
down to breathe their last might be planted with produce that would feed
them to repletion. But so far from any effort to save them having been
made by Spain, she has wilfully and designedly compassed their
destruction. She has driven them in from their fields and plantations
and forbidden them to help themselves; the plantations themselves have
been laid waste, and should the miserable reconcentrados attempt under
the pretended kindly dispensation of Blanco to return to their
properties they would find the Spanish guerillas lying in wait to
massacre them. No agony of either mind or body has been wanting. The
wife has lost her husband, the mother, her children; the child its
parents, the husband, his family. They have seen them die. Often they
have seen them slaughtered wantonly as they lay helpless, waiting a
slower end. The active as well as the passive cruelties of the Spaniards
toward these people have been well-nigh unimaginable."

Call Richard Harding Davis to the stand!

"In other wars men have fought with men, and women have suffered
indirectly because the men were killed, but in this war it is the women
herded together in the towns like cattle who are going to die, while the
men camped in the fields and mountains will live."

General Fitz Hugh Lee says:

"General Weyler believes that everything is fair in war and every means
justifiable that will ultimately write success on his standards. He did
not purpose to make war with velvet paws, but to achieve his purpose of
putting down the insurrection, if he had to wade t