has been largely lost, and the temper and forbearance of our people
have been so sorely tried as to beget a perilous unrest among our own
citizens, which has inevitably found its expression from time to time in
the National Legislature, so that issues wholly external to our own body
politic engross attention and stand in the way of that close devotion to
domestic advancement that becomes a self-contained commonwealth whose
primal maxim has been the avoidance of all foreign entanglements. All
this must needs awaken, and has, indeed, aroused, the utmost concern on
the part of this Government, as well during my predecessor's term as in
my own.

In April, 1896, the evils from which our country suffered through the
Cuban war became so onerous that my predecessor made an effort to bring
about a peace through the mediation of this Government in any way that
might tend to an honorable adjustment of the contest between Spain
and her revolted colony, on the basis of some effective scheme of
self-government for Cuba under the flag and sovereignty of Spain. It
failed through the refusal of the Spanish government then in power to
consider any form of mediation or, indeed, any plan of settlement which
did not begin with the actual submission of the insurgents to the mother
country, and then only on such terms as Spain herself might see fit to
grant. The war continued unabated. The resistance of the insurgents was
in no wise diminished.

The efforts of Spain were increased, both by the dispatch of fresh
levies to Cuba and by the addition to the horrors of the strife of
a new and inhuman phase happily unprecedented in the modern history
of civilized Christian peoples. The policy of devastation and
concentration, inaugurated by the Captain-General's _bando_ of
October 21, 1896, in the Province of Pinar del Rio was thence extended