of the most objectionable and offensive policies of the government that
had preceded it. No tangible relief was afforded the vast numbers of
unhappy reconcentrados, despite the reiterated professions made in that
regard and the amount appropriated by Spain to that end. The proffered
expedient of zones of cultivation proved illusory. Indeed no less
practical nor more delusive promises of succor could well have been
tendered to the exhausted and destitute people, stripped of all that
made life and home dear and herded in a strange region among
unsympathetic strangers hardly less necessitous than themselves.

By the end of December the mortality among them had frightfully
increased. Conservative estimates from Spanish sources placed the deaths
among these distressed people at over 40 per cent from the time General
Weyler's decree of reconcentration was enforced. With the acquiescence
of the Spanish authorities, a scheme was adopted for relief by
charitable contributions raised in this country and distributed, under
the direction of the consul-general and the several consuls, by noble
and earnest individual effort through the organized agencies of the
American Red Cross. Thousands of lives were thus saved, but many
thousands more were inaccessible to such forms of aid.

The war continued on the old footing, without comprehensive plan,
developing only the same spasmodic encounters, barren of strategic
result, that had marked the course of the earlier ten years' rebellion
as well as the present insurrection from its start. No alternative save
physical exhaustion of either combatant, and therewithal the practical
ruin of the island, lay in sight, but how far distant no one could
venture to conjecture.

At this juncture, on the 15th of February last, occurred the destruction