Women that are not living in their own homes, or at the houses of their relatives, will collect in the town of Jiguani, or Bayamo, where maintenance will be provided. Those who do not present themselves will be conducted forcibly.
The foregoing determinations will commence to take effect on the 14th of the present month.
EL CONDE DE BALMACEDA.
Bayamo, April 4, 1869.
Even Weyler, the "Butcher," has never succeeded in concocting a manifesto that surpassed this in malicious excuses for the ancient Spanish amusements of pillage, incendiarism and murder.
THE CAUSE A JUST ONE.
It is now conceded by high Spanish authorities that the insurgents had just grounds for this revolt, and Senor Dupuy de Lome, formerly the Spanish minister to the United States, admits in a letter to the New York Herald that a very large majority of the leading citizens of the island were in sympathy with the struggle for liberty.
The new government received the moral support of nearly all of the South American republics, but as many of them were troubled with internal dissensions, and uncertain of their own security, they were not in a condition to furnish assistance of a more practical nature, and the revolutionists were left to work out their own salvation.
In an exhaustive review of the trouble between Spain and her Cuban possessions, published in 1873, the Edinburg Review said:
"It is well known that Spain governs the island of Cuba with an iron and bloodstained hand. The former holds the latter deprived of civil, political and religious liberty. Hence the unfortunate Cubans being illegally prosecuted and sent into exile, or executed by military commissions in time of peace; hence their being kept from public meeting, and forbidden to speak or write on affairs of state; hence their remonstrances against the evils that afflict them being looked upon as the proceedings of rebels, from the fact that they are bound to keep silence and obey; hence the never-ending plague of hungry officials from Spain to devour the product of their industry and labor; hence their exclusion from public stations, and want of opportunity to fit themselves for the art of government; hence the restrictions to which public instruction with them is subjected, in order to keep them so ignorant as not to be able to know and enforce their rights in any shape or form whatever; hence the navy and the standing army, which are kept in their country at an enormous expenditure from their own wealth, to make them bend their knees and submit their necks to the iron yoke that disgraces them; hence the grinding taxation under which they labor, and which would make them all perish in misery but for the marvelous fertility of their soil."