THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY.
To enlarge upon the sufferings of the Cubans is a painful task, but it is a task that must be accomplished, in the interests of justice and humanity, and also that the reader may clearly understand why it was the bounden duty of the United States to interfere.
Let us therefore proceed with the evidence.
Julian Hawthorne gives his testimony as follows:
"These people have starved in a land capable of supplying tens of millions of people with abundant food. The very ground on which they lie down to breathe their last might be planted with produce that would feed them to repletion. But so far from any effort to save them having been made by Spain, she has wilfully and designedly compassed their destruction. She has driven them in from their fields and plantations and forbidden them to help themselves; the plantations themselves have been laid waste, and should the miserable reconcentrados attempt under the pretended kindly dispensation of Blanco to return to their properties they would find the Spanish guerillas lying in wait to massacre them. No agony of either mind or body has been wanting. The wife has lost her husband, the mother, her children; the child its parents, the husband, his family. They have seen them die. Often they have seen them slaughtered wantonly as they lay helpless, waiting a slower end. The active as well as the passive cruelties of the Spaniards toward these people have been well-nigh unimaginable."
Call Richard Harding Davis to the stand!
"In other wars men have fought with men, and women have suffered indirectly because the men were killed, but in this war it is the women herded together in the towns like cattle who are going to die, while the men camped in the fields and mountains will live."
General Fitz Hugh Lee says:
"General Weyler believes that everything is fair in war and every means justifiable that will ultimately write success on his standards. He did not purpose to make war with velvet paws, but to achieve his purpose of putting down the insurrection, if he had to wade through, up to the visor of his helmet, the blood of every Cuban, man, women and child, on the island."
Now hear General Lee relate the following incident, an incident which created much discussion and feeling in the United States: