rust and dirt, or lying twisted and broken under fallen walls. He will
learn that while one hundred and fifty-six vessels came into the port
of Matanzas in 1894, only eighty-eight came in 1895, and that but
sixteen touched there in 1896, and that while the export of sugar from
that port to the United States in 1894 amounted to eleven millions of
dollars, in 1895 it sank to eight millions of dollars, and in 1896 it
did not reach one million. I copied these figures one morning from the
consular books, and that loss of ten millions of dollars in two years
in one little port is but a sample of the facts that show what chaos
this war is working.

[Illustration: Spanish Cavalryman on a Texas Broncho]

In three weeks any member of the Senate or of Congress who wishes to
inform himself on this reign of terror in Cuba can travel from one end
of this island to the other and return competent to speak with absolute
authority. No man, no matter what his prejudices may be, can make this
journey and not go home convinced that it is his duty to try to stop
this cruel waste of life and this wanton destruction of a beautiful
country.

A reign of terror sounds hysterical, but it is an exact and truthful
descriptive phrase of the condition in Cuba. Insurgents and Spaniards
alike are laying waste the land, and neither side shows any sign of
giving up the struggle. But while the men are in the field fighting
after their fashion, for the independence of the island, the old men
and the infirm and the women and children, who cannot help the cause or
themselves, and who are destitute and starving and dying, have their
eyes turned toward the great republic that lies only eighty miles away,
and they are holding out their hands and asking "How long, O, Lord, how