When General Campos returned to Habana, at the close of the year 1895, it was to find popular discontent and political conspiracy directed against him. Already discouraged by the failure of his military campaign, and of his effort to break up the insurrection by conciliation, the disaffection at the capital completely disheartened the old soldier, who had conscientiously endeavored to do his duty according to his lights. He tendered his resignation, and the home Government appointed General Weyler, Marquis of Tenerife, to succeed him.

This man, who amply earned his sobriquet of “Butcher,” was the unwitting instrument of Cuba’s freedom. His atrocious barbarities, rather than the destruction of the Maine, were the cause of the United States declaring war against Spain. Although, at the outset, it appeared as though his succession to Campos was a dire blow to the insurgents, the event proved it to be a blessing in disguise. The retiring General believed that Spain should grant to the Cubans the most liberal administrative and political reforms, even to the extent of autonomy. It is possible that he might have brought the authorities at Madrid to his way of thinking and, in that case, quite probable that the rebellion would have been brought to a peaceful termination.

Weyler lost no time in instituting his concentration system. It was a measure in which he and Canovas, the premier of Spain, had great faith as a means of subduing the insurrection, but it utterly failed in its object and had a result of which its originators little dreamed. They excused it on the ground of military necessity, but it contravened the principles of civilized warfare in important particulars. It involved making prisoners of peaceful noncombatants, and went farther in neglecting to afford them the treatment which the least humane nation concedes to military captives. Indeed its brutality was such as savages would rarely be guilty of.

The people of the country districts, men, women, and children, were segregated within certain restricted bounds, sometimes defined by stockades, or trenches, and always guarded by troops. Sometimes they were permitted to enter neighboring towns, but, even in such cases, their movements were limited by military circumspection.

If this measure had gone no farther it might have been condoned. The British, in the Boer War, resorted to such an expedient, but they made their detention camps as comfortable as possible, they fed and clothed the inmates sufficiently, and afforded them medical attention. Weyler’s wretched reconcentrados were simply herded together and left to their own resources. They were reduced to begging of a people only one degree less impoverished than themselves. The townsman who gave a tortilla to a starving pacifico was usually depriving his own family. Disease, unchecked, ran riot in the concentration camps.

The mortality was fearful and those who survived were unfitted for years, the men to work, the women to bear healthy children. Cuba has not yet passed from the effects of Weyler’s barbaric measure.

After General Weyler’s arrival, Spain continued to send steady reënforcements to Cuba to fill the ranks thinned by disease. He never had fewer than one hundred thousand men under his command. With these he entered upon vigorous military operations, at first concentrating his forces upon Pinar del Rio with the object of crushing Maceo. He endeavored to isolate the leader at the western end of the Island by constructing a trocha, from coast to coast, across its narrowest part. The measure failed in its purpose. Maceo crossed the barrier and met his death near Habana in an otherwise trivial skirmish.

Weyler now directed his efforts against Gomez and Garcia, but his task was even a more difficult one than that of Campos had been. After spreading the rebellion over the entire Island, Gomez changed his tactics. It now became the practice of the insurgents to move stealthily about in the manigua, burning and destroying wherever they could find anything upon which to lay their hands, but avoiding contact with the Spanish troops. Thus Weyler’s soldiers were kept constantly chasing back and forth in endless and futile pursuit of an intangible enemy. By his orders such property as had escaped destruction by the rebels was ruined by the royalists.

By the middle of 1897, the Island was a mass of blackened ruins, an expanse of homeless waste. And the flood of insurrection had not been stayed in the slightest degree. Weyler had failed more utterly than Campos. But he had done more; he had aroused in the public mind of America a realization of the stubborn opposition of the Cubans to Spanish rule and the hopelessness of Spain’s effort to reassert it, combined with indignation at her methods. At length, but all too late, Spain awoke to the futility of longer attempting repression, and the necessity of conceding to the Cubans a liberal measure of justice and independence. Weyler was recalled, and General Blanco came to Cuba, bearing in his hand the olive branch of autonomy. He arrived in November and immediately set about reversing the policy of his predecessor. Amnesty was offered to all revolutionists; harsh decrees were annulled or suspended; political prisoners were released; the rigors of reconcentration were relaxed; the officials appointed by Weyler throughout the Island were removed and Cubans invited to take their places; a cabinet was actually installed at Habana and the machinery of home rule put in motion.

It was all of no avail. The insurgent leaders in the field positively refused to accept any