But the tax collector was there. The Castilian despoiler was there. The hand of the oppressor was laid heavily upon the Cubans, and they died at the edge of the sword through two hundred years of tyranny.
And in that day when the American Republic had attained its growth, had reached its manhood, there was a protest against a continuance of cruelty. The Republic demanded that the Don cease from troubling; that the Cubans be rescued.
President McKinley waited until the united voice of his countrymen convinced him that they had surely arrived at years of national discretion, and that their challenge was not the utterance of a passionate mood but the expression of an unalterable determination. And then he issued his order to Spain:
“Leave the West Indies forever!”
There was reason in the demand. Cuba lay so close to our shores that her continual suffering, the outrages perpetrated upon her people, became a scandal in the eyes of the Republic. It was like a strong man standing unmoved while a child is being beaten by a bully.
Besides, one consequence of such rule as the Spaniards maintained was a perilous sanitary condition in the cities that traded continually with the ports of the States. American cities had learned the rules of health, and had banished yellow fever and the cholera. But what profit in that provision if a ship sailed across the narrow sea and spread the plague upon our shores? There was reason in self defense for the notice to quit.
That fundamental principle of the nation called the “Monroe doctrine” forbade any power in the old world from extending its rule in the new. It is but a logical sequence of that system that an old world power which cannot in two hundred years complete its subjugation of a new world people has never had a right it could maintain here; that no king from Europe had title to soil in the Western hemisphere if he could not perfect that title in that lapse of time. And as a policy of the nation and the interest of the nation joined in dictating the action, the Spaniards were commanded to retire. The time had come when President McKinley could make his case good even in the courts of old-world kings. And there was not a murmur of protest from a palace abroad when Madrid received that portentous command.
But there was another reason—another consideration which men too often overlook, yet which was of the most stupendous value to the Republic. War with a foreign power would reunite a country divided by civil strife, and stubbornly, ill-temperedly refusing to perfect its peace.
It was probably admitted that the passions following the rebellion and particularly provoked by the assassination of President Lincoln, served as warrant for a severity in dealing with the Southern States which was far beyond the boundaries of justice. There was a Draconian rigidity about the laws which the losers were compelled to obey; a perhaps needless austerity in impressing the fact of conquest. Sectional passions were aroused, sectional jealousies and animosities were inflamed until unthinking men both North and South had achieved the bad success of creating a religion of hate. In the years when Major McKinley was acting the citizen-soldier part—putting away his sword and devoting himself to the activities of peace—many less patriotic and wise than he were teaching their children to hate the South. As the Swiss youth imbibed hatred of Austria with their mother’s milk, so these children in the North were filled with a bitter rage against the children who sat in the Southland, under the shadow of the stars and stripes. And the generation grew up in that enmity for brothers in the Republic, and many men profited by making the propagation of strife their one profession—the division of their country their one occupation. The poets say that love begets love. It is certainly as true that hatred begets hate. And if the youth of the North approached public questions always with the poison of sectional prejudice rankling in their hearts and warping their judgments, be sure the people of the South most cordially reciprocated. To thousands above the Ohio river, the states below that stream were still “rebel.” To thousands below the people of the North were brutal and murderous invaders.
Through all the period when the nation was gathering material strength the effort of wise men was to heal that hurt, to reunite the nation, to erase forever that bitter dividing sectional line. But they could not succeed. Throughout Major McKinley’s public speeches, dating from that first debate, when he was scarcely out of uniform, clear to the end of his career, one finds to-day no word of anger against the South; one finds unnumbered expressions of fraternal love and good will.