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The Path of Empire; a chronicle of the United States as a world power by Carl Russell Fish
page 76 of 208 (36%)
patience. Convinced of the good intentions of the new Spanish
Government, he sought to induce American public sentiment to
allow it time to act. He continued nevertheless to urge upon
Spain the fact that in order to be effective action must be
prompt.

Public sentiment against Spain grew every day stronger in the
United States and was given startling impulse in February, 1898,
by two of those critical incidents which are almost sure to occur
when general causes are potent enough to produce a white heat of
popular feeling. The Spanish Minister in the United States, Senor
Dupuy de Lome, had aroused the suspicion, during his summer
residence on the north shore of Massachusetts Bay, that he was
collecting information which would be useful to a Spanish fleet
operating on that coast. Whether this charge was true or not, at
any rate he wrote a letter to a friend, a Madrid editor visiting
Havana, in which he characterized McKinley as a vacillating and
timeserving politician. Alert American newspaper men, who
practically constituted a secret service of some efficiency,
managed to obtain the letter. On February 9, 1898, De Lome saw a
facsimile of this letter printed in a newspaper and at once
cabled his resignation. In immediately accepting De Lome's
resignation Spain anticipated an American demand for his recall
and thus saved Spanish pride, though undoubtedly at the expense
of additional irritation in the United States, where it was
thought that he should have been punished instead of being
allowed to slip away.

Infinitely more serious than this diplomatic faux pas was the
disaster which befell the United States battleship Maine: On
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