Minister Sickles replied:
"President Castelar received these observations with his usual kindness, and told me confidentially that at seven o'clock in the morning, as soon as he read the telegram from Cuba, and without reference to any international question, for that indeed had not occurred to him, he at once sent a message to the captain-general, admonishing him that the death penalty must not be imposed upon any non-combatant, without the previous approval of the Cortes, nor upon any person taken in arms against the government without the sanction of the executive."
About that time, a writer of some celebrity, who was also a war correspondent, named Ralph Keeler, mysteriously disappeared. Although it was never proven, there is little doubt but that he was assassinated by the Spaniards.
Then, as now, there was an intense hatred in the Spanish breast against every citizen of the United States.
As Murat Halstead expresses it, there seemed to be a blood madness in the air.
Mr. Halstead, by the way, tells an anecdote of a madman, who seized a rifle with sabre attached and assaulted a young man who had asked him an innocent question. He knocked him down and stabbed him to death with a bayonet, sticking it through him a score of times as he cried:
"Cable my country that I have killed a rebel!"
The murderer was adjudged insane. Further comment is unnecessary.
To return to the controversy over the Virginius between the United States and Spain.
General Sickles, as he had been instructed, made a solemn protest against the barbarities perpetrated at Santiago.