ding in the aggregate an annual revenue of twenty-five millions of
dollars for which they receive no equivalent,--no representation, no
utterance, for pen and tongue are alike proscribed,--no honor, no
office, no emolument; while their industry is crippled, their
intercourse with other nations hampered in every way, their bread
literally snatched from their lips, the freedom of education denied, and
every generous, liberal aspiration of the human soul stifled in its
birth. And this in the nineteenth century, and in North America.

Such are the contrasts, broad and striking, and such the reflections
forced upon the mind of the citizen of the United States in Cuba. Do
they never occur to the minds of the Creoles? We are told that they are
willing slaves. Spain tells us so, and she extols to the world with
complacent mendacity the loyalty of her "_siempre fielissima isla de
Cuba_." But why does she have a soldier under arms for every four white
adults? We were about to say, white male citizens, but there are no
citizens in Cuba. A proportionate military force in this country would
give us a standing army of more than a million bayonets, with an annual
expenditure, reckoning each soldier to cost only two hundred dollars per
annum, of more than two hundred millions of dollars. And this is the
peace establishment of Spain in Cuba--for England and France and the
United States are all her allies, and she has no longer to fear the
roving buccaneers of the Gulf who once made her tremble in her island
fastness. For whom then is this enormous warlike preparation? Certainly
for no external enemy,--there is none. The question answers itself,--it
is for her very loyal subjects, the people of Cuba, that the queen of
Spain makes all this warlike show.

It is impossible to conceive of any degree of loyalty that would be
proof against the unparalleled burthens and atrocious system by which
the mother country has ever loaded and weighed down her western
colonists. They must be either more or less than men if they still
cherish attachment to a foreign throne under such circumstances. But the
fact simply is, the Creoles of Cuba are neither angels nor brutes; they
are, it is true, a long-suffering and somewhat indolent people, lacking
in a great degree the stern qualities of the Anglo-Saxon and the
Anglo-Norman races, but nevertheless intelligent, if wanting culture,
and not without those noble aspirations for independence and freedom,
desti