Weyler’s application of this policy was utterly brutal.  The people of the country were herded in prison camps, in settlements surrounded by stockades or trenches beyond which they might not pass.  No provision was made for their food or maintenance.  The victims were non-combatants, women, and children.  In his message of December, 1897, President McKinley said of this system, as applied by Weyler, “It was not civilized warfare; it was extermination.  The only peace it could beget was that of the wilderness and the grave.”  In my experience as a campaign correspondent in several conflicts, I have necessarily seen more or less of gruesome sights, the result of disease and wounds, but I have seen nothing in any way comparable, in horror and pitifulness, to the victims of this abominable system.  To describe their condition in detail would be little short of offensive, those groups of hopeless, helpless sufferers who lingered only until death came and kindly put them out of their misery and pain.  But by this time, two forces had come into active operation, dire alarm in Spain and wrath and indignation in the United States.  Weyler had failed as Martinez Campos, when leaving the island, predicted.  He was recalled, and was succeeded, on October 31, 1897, by General Blanco.  The new incumbent tried conciliation, but it failed.  The work had gone too far.  The party in the field had become the dominant party, not to be suppressed either by force of arms or by promises of political and economic reform.  At last, Spain yielded.  Outside pressure on Madrid, chiefly from the United States, prevailed.  A scheme for Cuban autonomy was devised and, on January 1, 1898, was put into effect.  But it came too late.  It was welcomed by many non-participants in the war, and a form of government was organized under it.  But the party then dominant, the army in the field, distrusted the arrangement and would have none of it.  All overtures were rejected and the struggle continued.  On February 15, 1898, came the disaster to the battleship Maine, in the harbor of Havana.  On April 11th, President McKinley’s historic message went to Congress, declaring that “the only hope of relief and repose from a condition which can no longer be endured is the enforced pacification of Cuba,” and asking for power and authority to use the military and naval forces of the United States to effect a termination of the strife in Cuba.  Such, in the briefest possible outline, is the record of this eventful period, eventful alike for Cuba and for the United States.

During this struggle, the people of the United States became deeply interested in the affairs of the island, and the Administration in Washington became gravely concerned by them.  A preceding chapter, on the United States and Cuba, dropped the matter of the relations of this country to the island at the end of the Ten Years’ War, but the relations were by no means dropped, nor were they even suspended.  The affairs