The peasant farmers, with their families, were only allowed to bring with them what they could carry on their backs, when they were forced to leave all that they had in the world, and remove to the places of "concentration," where it was impossible for them to make a living.
Before leaving they saw their houses and crops burned, and their live stock, be it much or little, that they possessed, confiscated.
Starvation was before them, and starve they did. And let the reader bear this fact well in mind—these were non-combatants, women and children.
The deaths have occurred in ghastly numbers. More than two hundred thousand have perished from starvation and starvation alone, with no hand from the government stretched out to aid them. The record made by the butcher and the butcher's emissaries is without parallel in all history. No wonder that the United States held its breath in horror, before raising its mailed hand to strike forever the chains from this suffering people.
General Weyler did not care how deeply he should wade in blood, nor to what age or sex this blood belonged, so long as he should attain his ends.
Talk as you please about the atrocities of the Turks, but they pale before those of the Spaniards in Cuba; acts committed, too, not in secret, but openly and by public proclamation.
Read what Stephen Bonsal, who was an eye-witness, says in his book: "The Real Condition of Cuba To-day."
"In the western provinces, we find between three and four hundred thousand people penned up in starvation stations and a prey to all kinds of epidemic diseases. They are without means and without food, and with only the shelter that the dried palm-leaves of their hastily erected bohios afford, and in the rainy season that is now upon them, there is no shelter at all. They have less clothing than the Patagonian savages, and, half naked, they sleep upon the ground, exposed to the noxious vapors which these low-lying swamp-lands emit. They have no prospect before them but to die, or, what is more cruel, to see those of their own flesh and blood dying about them, and to be powerless to succor and to save. About these starvation stations the savage sentries pace up and down with ready rifle and bared machete, to shoot down and to cut up any one who dares to cross the line. And yet, who are these men who are shot down in the night like midnight marauders? And why is it they seek, with all the desperate courage of despair, to cross that line where death is always awaiting their coming, and almost invariably overtakes them? They are attempting nothing that history will preserve upon its imperishable tablets, or even this passing generation remember. No, they are simply attempting to get beyond the starvation lines, to dig their potatoes and yams, to bring home again to the hovel in which their families are housed with death and hunger all about them. And they do their simple duty, not blinded as to the danger, or without warning as to their probable fate, for hardly an hour of their interminable day passes without their hearing the sharp click of the trigger and the hoarse cry of the sentry which precede the murderous volley; and every morning, through the narrow, filthy lanes upon which the huts have been erected the guerillas, drive along the pack-mules bearing the mutilated bodies of those who have been punished cruelly for the crime of seeking food to keep their children from starvation. This colossal crime, with all the refinement of slow torture, is so barbarous, so bloodthirsty and yet so exquisite, that the human mind refuses to believe it, and revolts at the suggestion that it was conceived, planned and plotted by a man. And yet this crime, this murder of thousands of innocent men, women and children, is now being daily committed in Cuba, at our very doors and well-nigh in sight of our shores, and we are paying very little heed to the spectacle."
These words were written before the United States came to the rescue, and the criticism in the last sentence is, thank Heaven, no longer applicable. We are slow to act perhaps, but when we do act, our work is effective, and we never rest until our aim is accomplished.