gement of young army officers in advanced and
up-to-date Studies. While their contemporaries in other professions were
adding graduate training to the general education which a college gave,
the graduates of West Point were considered to have made themselves in
four years sufficiently proficient for all the purposes of warfare.

By the middle nineties thoughtful students of contemporary movements
were aware that a new epoch in national history was approaching. What
form this national development would take was, however, still uncertain,
and some great event was obviously required to fix its character.
Blaine's Pan-Americanism had proved insufficient and, though the baiting
of Great Britain was welcome to a vociferous minority, the forces making
for peace were stronger than those in favor of war. Whatever differences
there were did not reach to fundamentals but were rather in the nature
of legal disputes between neighbors whom a real emergency would quickly
bring to the assistance of each other. A crisis involving interest,
propinquity, and sentiment, was needed to shake the nation into an
activity which would clear its views.

At the very time of the Venezuela difficulty, such a crisis was taking
shape in the Caribbean. Cuba had always been an object of immediate
concern to the United States. The statesmen of the Jeffersonian period
all looked to its eventually becoming part of American territory. Three
quarters of a century before, when the revolt of the Spanish colonies
had halted on the shores of the mainland, leaving the rich island of
Cuba untouched, John Quincy Adams, on April 28, 1823, in a lengthy and
long-considered dispatch to Mr. Nelson, the American Minister to Spain,
asserted that the United States could not consent to the passing of Cuba
from the flag of Spain to that of any other European power, that under
existing conditions Cuba was considered safer in the hands of Spain than
in those of the revolutionaries, and that the United States stood for
the maintenance of the status quo, with the expectation that Cuba would
ultimately become American territory.

By the late forties and the fifties, however, the times had changed,
and American policy had changed with them. It was becoming more and more
evident that, although no real revolution had as yet broken out, the
"Pearl of the Antilles" was bound to Spain by compulsion rather than by
love. In the United States there was a general feeling that the time had