e of his known
character, is that he was not, and indeed that he was not aware that
they were being made. There is even reason for thinking that after the
Morales case was brought to his attention, he prohibited any more such
clandestine and illegal enterprises. Tragic as the incidents were, and
especially regrettable as was the sacrifice of such a man as Ruiz, it
was well to have it made unmistakably clear that the Cubans were not
inclined to end the war by surrender or by compromise, but were intent
upon fighting it out to the end.

In such circumstances Blanco strove for the last time to defeat the
Cuban national desire for independence. He probably realized in advance
the certainty of failure. He had been Captain-General before, succeeding
Campos after the Ten Years' War and during the Little War, and he must
have known the temper of the Cuban people and the unwillingness of the
great majority of them to accept the delusive scheme of autonomy which
Spain was fitfully offering, and in which he himself never had any real
faith and which, indeed, he had never favored. But he was a loyal
Spanish soldier, of the better type, and he was personally as little
odious to the Cubans as any Spanish Captain General could be, for he had
never been notably tyrannical or cruel. The decree of autonomy was
adopted by the Spanish government on November 25, 1897, largely because
of the urgings--to use no stronger term--of the United States, and was
promulgated by Blanco in Cuba early in December. The scheme provided for
universal suffrage; a bi-cameral Legislature consisting of a Council of
eighteen elected members and seventeen appointed by the crown, and a
House containing one elected member for each 25,000 inhabitants. To this
Legislature were nominally committed most of the functions of
government. But it was provided that "The supreme government of the
colony shall be exercised by a Governor-General." That was the crux of
the whole matter. That made the Captain-General, or Governor-General as
he was thereafter to be called, the practical dictator of the island.

To this entirely illusive and delusive scheme, the remnant of the
Autonomist party gave adherence with a devotion worthy of a better
cause. The Reformist faction of the Spanish party also, though not so
readily, approved it. The intransigent Constitutionalists would have
none of it. Tenuous and futile as were its apparent concessions to the
Cubans, they were far too much