It is difficult to know what the American people do want. They do not
want peace, apparently, for their senators, some through an ignorant
hatred of England and others through a personal dislike of the
President, emasculated the arbitration treaty; and they do not want
war, for, as some one has written, if we did not go to war with Spain
when she murdered the crew of the _Virginius,_ we never will.

[Illustration: General Weyler in the Field]

But if the executive and the legislators wish to assure themselves,
like "Fighting Bob Acres," that they have some right on their side,
they need not turn back to the _Virginius_ incident. There are
reasons enough to-day to justify their action, if it is to be their
intellects and not their feelings that must move them to act. American
property has been destroyed by Spanish troops to the amount of many
millions, and no answer made to demands of the State Department for an
explanation. American citizens have been imprisoned and shot--some
without a trial, some in front of their own domiciles, and American
vessels are turned over to the uses of the Spanish secret police. These
would seem to be sufficient reasons for interfering.

But why should we not go a step farther and a step higher, and
interfere in the name of humanity? Not because we are Americans, but
because we are human beings, and because, within eighty miles of our
coast, Spanish officials are killing men and women as wantonly as
though they were field mice, not in battle, but in cold blood--cutting
them down in the open roads, at the wells to which they have gone for
water, or on their farms, where they have stolen away to dig up a few
potatoes, having first run the gauntlets of the forts and risked their