athy with the revolutionists. Efforts were also made
to land expeditions from the United States. One formidable party was to
have sailed from Fernandina, Florida, a month before the passage of the
Abarzuza law, but it was checked and disbanded by the United States
authorities.

The year 1895 was not inappropriate for the beginning of a war which
should annihilate the Spanish colonial empire and should add a new
member to the world's community of sovereign nations. In almost every
quarter of the globe great things were happening. At the antipodes Japan
was completing her crushing defeat of China and was thus bringing
herself forward as one of the great military and naval powers. The
ancient empire of Siam was establishing an enlightened constitutional
and parliamentary system of government. In Africa the epochal conflict
between Boer and Briton was developing inexorably, and France was about
to achieve the conquest of Madagascar. In Europe, Nicholas II was newly
seated upon the throne of the Czars, and the strange resignation of the
Presidency by Casimir-Perier threw France into such a crisis as she had
scarcely known before since the foundation of the Republic. Nearer home,
Peru and Ecuador were convulsed with revolution, and the controversy
between Venezuela and British Guiana began to loom acute and ominous. In
such a setting was the War of Cuban Independence staged.

The foremost director of that war, its organizer and inspirer, was Jose
Marti; one of those rare geniuses who have appeared occasionally in the
history of the world to be the incarnation of great ideals of justice
and human right. He was indeed many times a genius: Organizer,
economist, historian, poet, statesman, tribune of the people, apostle of
freedom, above all, Man. In himself he united the virtues, the
enthusiasm and the energising vitality which his countrymen needed to
have aroused in themselves. To his disorganized and disheartened country
he brought a magic personality which won all hearts and inspired them
all with his own irrepressible and indestructible ideal, National
Independence.

Marti was a native Cuban, born in Havana on January 28, 1853. In his
mere boyhood he became an eloquent and inspiring advocate of the ideal
to which he devoted his life and which he did so much to realize; and at
the outbreak of the Ten Years' War, when he was scarcely yet sixteen
years old, the Spanish government recognized in him one of its most
formidable