merican
trade and commerce, caused irritation, annoyance, and disturbance among
our citizens, and, by the exercise of cruel, barbarous, and uncivilized
practices of warfare, shocked the sensibilities and offended the humane
sympathies of our people.

Since the present revolution began, in February, 1895, this country has
seen the fertile domain at our threshold ravaged by fire and sword in
the course of a struggle unequaled in the history of the island and
rarely paralleled as to the numbers of the combatants and the bitterness
of the contest by any revolution of modern times where a dependent
people striving to be free have been opposed by the power of the
sovereign state.

Our people have beheld a once prosperous community reduced to
comparative want, its lucrative commerce virtually paralyzed, its
exceptional productiveness diminished, its fields laid waste, its mills
in ruins, and its people perishing by tens of thousands from hunger and
destitution. We have found ourselves constrained, in the observance
of that strict neutrality which our laws enjoin and which the law of
nations commands, to police our own waters and watch our own seaports
in prevention of any unlawful act in aid of the Cubans.

Our trade has suffered, the capital invested by our citizens in Cuba
has been largely lost, and the temper and forbearance of our people
have been so sorely tried as to beget a perilous unrest among our own
citizens, which has inevitably found its expression from time to time in
the National Legislature, so that issues wholly external to our own body
politic engross attention and stand in the way of that close devotion to
domestic advancement that becomes a self-contained commonwealth whose
primal maxim has been the avoidance of all foreign entanglements. All
this must needs awaken, and has, indeed, aroused, the utmost concern on
the part of this Government, as well during my predecessor's term as in
my own.

In April, 1896, the evils from which our country suffered through the
Cuban war became so onerous that my predecessor made an effort to bring
about a peace through the mediation of this Government in any way that
might tend to an honorable adjustment of the contest between Spain
and her revolted colony, on the basis of some effective scheme of
self-government for Cuba under the flag and sovereignty of Spain. It
failed through the refusal of the Spanish government then in power to
consider any form of mediation or,