t if the insurrection has not gained ground, it is equally true that
Spain has not suppressed it. Climate, disease, and the occasional bullet
have worked destruction among the soldiers of Spain; and although the
Spanish authorities have possession of every seaport and every town on
the island, they have not been able to subdue the hostile feeling which
has driven a considerable number of the native inhabitants of the island
to armed resistance against Spain, and still leads them to endure the
dangers and the privations of a roaming life of guerrilla warfare.

On either side the contest has been conducted, and is still carried on,
with a lamentable disregard of human life and of the rules and practices
which modern civilization has prescribed in mitigation of the necessary
horrors of war. The torch of Spaniard and of Cuban is alike busy in
carrying devastation over fertile regions; murderous and revengeful
decrees are issued and executed by both parties. Count Valmaseda and
Colonel Boet, on the part of Spain, have each startled humanity and
aroused the indignation of the civilized world by the execution, each,
of a score of prisoners at a time, while General Quesada, the Cuban
chief, coolly and with apparent unconsciousness of aught else than a
proper act, has admitted the slaughter, by his own deliberate order,
in one day, of upward of 650 prisoners of war.

A summary trial, with few, if any, escapes from conviction, followed by
immediate execution, is the fate of those arrested on either side on
suspicion of infidelity to the cause of the party making the arrest.

Whatever may be the sympathies of the people or of the Government of the
United States for the cause or objects for which a part of the people of
Cuba are understood to have put themselves in armed resistance to the
Government of Spain, there can be no just sympathy in a conflict carried
on by both parties alike in such barbarous violation of the rules of
civilized nations and with such continued outrage upon the plainest
principles of humanity.

We can not discriminate in our censure of their mode of conducting their
contest between the Spaniards and the Cubans. Each commit the same
atrocities and outrage alike the established rules of war.

The properties of many of our citizens have been destroyed or embargoed,
the lives of several have been sacrificed, and the liberty of others has
been restrained. In every case that has come to the knowledge of the
G