different frame of mind from that in which he had come to Cuba eight
months before. He had at that time in the island more than 100,000
troops in active service. Since his appointment as Captain-General
nearly 80,000 men had been sent thither from Spain. In addition there
were the Volunteers, or what was left of them. According to Spanish
authorities at Havana at that time the Volunteers numbered 63,000. True,
they would not take the field. But they were serviceable for police and
garrison duty in cities and towns, thus permitting all the regular army
to be put into the field. The same authorities declared that with the
Volunteers, marines and all other branches, Campos had at his disposal
189,000 men. It is probable that the entire force under Gomez and Maceo
in that first invasion of Matanzas did not exceed 10,000 men. These
things gave "Spain's greatest General" much food for thought; not of
the most agreeable kind.
It gave others food for thought; the Spanish Loyalists of both
Constitutionalist and Reformist predilections, and the dwindling but
still resolute body of Cuban Autonomists. The last-named were at this
desperate conjuncture of affairs Campos's best friends. The
Constitutionalists were hostile to him. They had from the first
disapproved his moderate and humane methods, wishing to return to the
savagery of Valmaseda in the Ten Years' War. The Reformists were
hesitant; they had little faith in Campos, yet they doubted the
expedience of openly repudiating him. The Autonomists, having faith in
his sincerity, respecting his humanity, and deploring the devastation
and ruin which was befalling Cuba, urged that he should be supported
loyally in at least one last effort to pacify the island and abate the
horrors of civil war.
The intellectual and moral power of the Autonomists carried the day. The
Reformists first and then the Constitutionalists agreed to join them in
making a demonstration of loyalty and confidence to the Captain-General,
to cheer and sustain him in the depression--almost despair--which he was
certainly suffering. So the representatives of all three factions
appeared publicly before Campos. For the Constitutionalists, Santos
Guzman spoke; an intense reactionary, who could not altogether conceal
his feelings of disapproval of Campos's liberal course, or his
realization of the desperate plight in which the country was at that
time. But he made an impassioned pledge of the loyalty of his party to
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