in contact with their mothers' arms. A planter who had at one time
employed a large number of these people, and who was moving about among
them, said that five hundred had died in Cardenas since the order to
leave the fields had been issued. Another gentleman told me that in the
huts at the back of the town there had been twenty-five cases of
small-pox in one week, of which seventeen had resulted in death.

I do not know that the United States will interfere in the affairs of
Cuba, but whatever may happen later, this is what is likely to happen
now, and it should have some weight in helping to decide the question
with those whose proper business it is to determine it.

Thousands of human beings are now herded together around the seaport
towns of Cuba who cannot be fed, who have no knowledge of cleanliness
or sanitation, who have no doctors to care for them and who cannot care
for themselves.

Many of them are dying of sickness and some of starvation, and this is
the healthy season. In April and May the rains will come, and the fever
will thrive and spread, and cholera, yellow fever and small-pox will
turn Cuba into one huge plague spot, and the farmers' sons whom Spain
has sent over here to be soldiers, and who are dying by the dozens
before they have learned to pull the comb off a bunch of cartridges,
are going to die by the hundreds, and women and children who are
innocent of any offense will die with them, and there will be a
quarantine against Cuba, and no vessel can come into her ports or leave
them.

All this is going to happen, I am led to believe, not from what I saw
in any one village, but in hundreds of villages. It will not do to put