him without waiting to be sent for. The alcalde tremblingly informed the CaptainGeneral that he had been busily engaged in attending to the arrangements for his reception. Scarcely heeding his apology, Weyler demanded to know how many volunteers he had in the place. The alcalde replied that there were none, and in reply to the next question "why?" he endeavored to explain that none of the residents of the town desired to do military duty, whereupon the chief thundered that the place was a hot-bed of insurgent sympathizers, and that was the reason. Then he inquired the number of regulars doing garrison duty in the place. Eighty men," replied the alcalde. "Too many to protect the property of rebel sympathizers!" exclaimed Weyler, and he gave orders to have all but eight of the garrison incorporated into his own ranks, at the same time mulcting the alcalde in the sum of $100. As if to show his further contempt for the place, he refused the breakfast prepared in anticipation of his arrival, but, calling for some country cheese, he ate it with some of the hard biscuit furnished for the soldiers.

At the next town to which he came, the alcalde showed him a list of twentyfive volunteers, whereupon the General declared the town to be a loyal one, and as a reward for the faithful disposition of his subjects he added to its garrison, twenty regular soldiers.

An example of Weyler's peculiar methods may be shown in another instance. In certain districts of Cuba some fine brands of coffee are grown, which are highly appreciated in the towns.

a war measure, the rebel government decreed that none of this coffee should be taken into any of the towns or villages under pain of death. As the insurgents allowed no one in the country where the coffee was grown, and having hanged those who had shown a disposition to violate their decrees, it was an easy matter for them to have a monopoly, at least of the coffee. Almost immediately that Weyler became aware of this fact he published his decree, prohibiting the planters from gathering their crops at all. That the planter, if a loyalist, was unable to gather his crop, while, if an insurgent, was unaffected by any of Weyler's decrees, is apparent.

Owing to the irresolute character of

the Cuban, Weyler has been able to take the field and continue his hide-and-seek game with the few armed patriots who have remained in the field. Strange as it may seem, the Spanish General-inChief has lacked determination, or military ability to crush any one band of insurgents, but has rather carried on his warfare by the slow process of starvation, which in a fertile island like Cuba, is extremely slow, while the Cubans have simply waited. I have known the Spanish columns in the field to avoid meeting a small band of armed insurgents, although, when properly officered, there is no disputing the fact that the Spanish soldier will fight. The operations of the columns consist chiefly of marching back and forth through the country, slaying cattle, digging up potato gardens, and cutting down banana plants, and even this work is not done thoroughly. While on my journey in search of Gomez, my attention was called to a plantation of bananas which the soldiers had attempted to destroy. In that part of the field bordering the road, they had swung their machetes most successfully, clipping off the tops of the plants, but where the field was bordered by dense forest, it was not damaged, owing to the soldiers' fear of lurking insurgents.

Occasionally one of the columns is fired upon by ten or a dozen rebels. The Spaniards will return their fire in company volleys, seldom making any determined effort to capture their enemies, and after using a great deal of ammunition in useless firing, they return to the centre of operations and report an action in which they have killed about twice as many men as were actually opposed to them.

Almost every one, who has attempted to explain Weyler's inability to put down the insurrection, has accounted for it by stating that the Spaniards do not desire to terminate the lamentable condition of affairs, owing to the opportunity presented to them for private gain. While we listen to the reasons for this belief, we are told, almost in the same breath, that Spain is bankrupt, the island of Cuba ruined, and the army unpaid for months past. Although there is no doubt that a Spanish officer will avail himself of an opportunity to put money in his pocket as quickly as will one of our own politicians, it is a hard matter

for him to do so when there is not money enough to pay his own salary and that of his subalterns. Judging from my own knowledge of the Spaniards in this war, I do not believe that there is a single Spanish officer in Cuba to-day, or soldier either, who would not throw up his hat with joy upon hearing that the war was at an end and that they were about to go home. That Spain is bankrupt, that she has not paid her troops for six months, and that she or her officers are continuing the war for the money there is in it, is a statement, the fallacy of which even our newspaper correspondents should at once see.

The situation in Cuba at present is this. The Island is divided in half by the Jucaro-Moron Trocha. To the east of the Trocha, the cities and towns are in the hands of the Spaniards, while the country is practically under the control of the insurgents, just as the country west of the Trocha was before Weyler took the field. My last information from the extreme western province, Pinar del Rio, was to the effect that the blockade had been raised from the Spanish towns and that the pacificos were allowed once more to go into the fields and till the soil. I am also told that there are no insurgents there, save a few scattered bands, who remain in the hills and fly before the approaching columns. The great central provinces, lying between Pinar del Rio and the Trocha, are practically uninhabited, except by wandering bands of rebels, and wherever there may be a suitable force of Spanish soldiers. General Gomez is still roaming around between the bushes and the savannas, in the vicinity of Sancti-Spiritus.

When

I last saw him he had with him 130 armed men, and about an equal number of servants. Although the Spanish troops were continually on the move about him, they were unable either to surround or to capture him. They were eminently successful, however, in breaking up the provisional government's system of prefecturas, workshops, etc. The famous "Siguenea," that supposedly impregnable stronghold, where the insurgents had their hospitals, etc., and which it was inferred the Spanish soldiers never could or never would try to enter, has been repeatedly invaded, while the Cubans there who were secure in their belief of safety have been scattered like chaff be

fore the wind. To prevent insurgent reoccupation of the mountainous country, the Spaniards are busily engaged in constructing little forts all through it, such as they maintained in the last war.

It is foolish for the Cuban, and his sympathizing newspaper correspondent, to say that in spite of Weyler's cruel war upon the pacifico, he has not been successful, and that the insurrection is stronger than ever. As has been confessed to me in the field, since the death of Maceo, the insurgents have steadily lost strength; and, when it is too late, the Cuban laborante in this country will wake up to the fact that he has been deceived by the imbecile reports from Key West, inventions of Havana correspondents who have never seen a real live rebel in their lives.

Weyler has announced that the western half of the island is now pacified, and that as soon as the winter campaign opens, he will move his troops to the other side of the Trocha, and then put into effect the same plan of campaign as he has carried out in the west. If the armed insurgents there, under General Carlixto Garcia, cannot make a better showing for themselves than those under Maximo Gomez, the poor pacifico will be made, as he has felt it in the West, to feel the brunt of the war, and eventually Cubans and their sympathizers in this country will be convinced that battles cannot be fought, and independence won, by waiting for the enemy to get tired and go home. Surely if the independence is worth having, it is worth fighting for. We might ask those prophets who tell us that they can foresee, and who predict almost to a day when the Spaniards will have to withdraw, what will Gomez and his army do when that great "scuttling" takes place, upon finding themselves in possession of a city like Havana, after their three years of bushwhacking.

THOMAS R. DAWLEY, JR.

The magnitude of the sacrifices made by Spain in her attempts to subdue her revolting colonies, remarks the London "Spectator," is seen in the official figures issued by the Spanish Minister of War. The following forces were sent to Cuba between Nov., 1895, and May, 1897: Thirteen expeditions, comprising 181,738 men, 6,261 officers, and 40 Generals; and 91 guns and 12 quickfiring guns. If this tragedy of a nation were not so infinitely pathetic there would be something comic in these 40 Generals utterly helpless before a mob of ragged insurgents.

thought that so successful an actor as Edwin Booth was quite eminent enough without a regular education; but frequently, in his letters and conversations, he reproached his father for having denied him, when he had ample means, the education which he himself had received. It is well known that Disraeli drove John Bright to the study of history, by his taunts in the House of Commons upon his ignorance of facts, which if he had been a University man, would have been a part of his education.

We are told that Herbert Spencer has performed a gigantic task without having been a University man; but it is really no arrogance to claim, at this day, when Spencer's work has been examined and discussed for many years, that in some respects it is conceivable that Spencer would have avoided a number of rocks on which he has struck, if he had been thoroughly trained as a youth in Cambridge or Oxford. Who will not agree that our wonderful Walt Whitman would have been made less barbarous and no less poetic if he had been a college-bred man? We are told that Shakespeare was not a University man; but let us remember that John Milton was, and so far as style is concerned Milton is, the superior of any man who ever wrote English.

We have been told that colleges make people impractical; that some employers do not want a college-bred man about. It is conceivable that some employers are small enough to dislike the neighborhood of any superiority. It is also possible that a college education, by fitting one for a higher class of work, unfits him for a lower. That is in some measure well.

Is it not a good thing that in these utilitarian times influences are brought to bear, which give some of our citizens ideals that seem impractical to the wholly sordid? Yet Mr. C. A. Dana of the New York "Sun," says that he prefers to have a reporter who can scan Horace or read Livy; that he will report a dog-fight better than a man without classical education.

When we consider the large number of successful lawyers and physicians, writers, railroad presidents, politicians and financiers who are college-bred, we need not fret over-much about the impeachment of college training as impractical.

We are a new country and have tried

many experiments and have had many heresies; but before we give ear seriously to the heresy of advocating the abolition or the belittling of college education, let us be sure of our lessons from experience. Call the roll of the great English writers, historians, poets, novelists and essayists, and we will find that most and the greatest of them, have, with rare exceptions, been college men. In the list are Bacon and Milton, Swift and Johnson, Wordsworth and Byron, Shelley and Tennyson, Browning and Carlyle. Take the statesmen or the warriors of England, and the same fact appears.

It goes without saying that Universities cannot make great men without the materials. There were great men before there were Universities; that king of men, Agamemnon, no doubt was without a college course, and there were great men even before him. But even so far back as the times of Moses, we find that the mighty law-giver had been trained in the great University of Egypt. The brightest minds of Athens and of Rome enjoyed what was equivalent to our college training. The bright lights of the Middle Ages were generally University men; a large per cent. of the bright lights of modern times are graduates of our higher seats of learning.

Nor must we overlook the fact that the greatest of our American writers have been college men; Bryant and Longfellow, Lowell and Holmes and Emerson. The most accomplished editor to-day in our country, Charles A. Dana, is a college-bred man. Over against him may be cited the instance of Horace Greeley; but while Greeley's influence was vast, and his knowledge prodigious, his work, for wisdom and sound-mindedness and philosophical breadth, was by no means equal to that of Dana. And the "Tribune" at its best under Greeley, whatever it does now, never influenced in the same way the intelligence of the country as the New York "Sun" does to-day.

The fact is pointed out that such accomplished writers as Howells, Henry James, and Aldrich are not college men. The claim made for the colleges, is not that one can never be a great writer, or statesman, or leader in any department, without a college course; such a claim would be nonsense. But the claim is, that the greatest and best will be helped

in their work, and in its perfecting, by a regular education; and that the average person will be made vastly more efficient by a college course.

It is not necessary to assert or claim, in order to justify the maintenance of colleges and their patronage, that every one who has an ambition to excel must forthwith go through a college curriculum. The college course, manifestly, is not for everybody; not for the people without means to pursue the course; not for those who are pressed with duties or for the means of a livelihood that will not allow an intermission for six years; it may not be for persons of extraordinary genius, although Napoleon was drilled in a military school that was equivalent to a college, and although the rosters of the English, Irish, and Scotch Universities contain the names of the greater number of the celebrities of Great Britain.

The college course comes in a period of life when the mind is most capable of impressions and of training; so that the years of study in a college drill and strengthen the mind for future acquisition and reception of knowledge. If, during the same period the youth is left to himself, he turns to books at all, he is likely to read in an unsystematic way, and to cram a large amount of undigested information. The college course gives the foundation for systematic knowledge, teaches how to study, and indicates to the student where to find knowledge.

We are of the opinion of Carlyle, that "the true University nowadays, is a library of books;" but no inconsiderable part of the library of books had better be studied under the tuition of masters in a University. One may obtain the same knowledge of facts in his own library, as in a college, but the amount of mental drill will not be the same.

Let us consider, for a moment, the work of some celebrated men who have not been college bred. We hold with many that such an uncommon man as Robert Burns could have been helped into a much broader and deeper kind of work than that which he performed, if he had been educated at one of the great Universities. Instead of being one of the minor singers, instead of being a spring by the wayside, as Carlyle calls him, Burns undoubtedly had the capabilities of producing work of much greater range

and depth than he did. A University, and then a great library, would have helped him to this. The college training not only widens the horizon, and adds to the range of the mind, but it gives a soundness to the judgment, and a logicalness to the mental operations which are usually lacking in men who have not received this training.

The novelist W. D. Howells is a shining example of a littérateur without college training; he has undoubtedly been a steadfast student of many subjects; and on account of his native ability and his acquirements, it goes without saying that he can "give points" to the majority of his college-bred fellow-citizens. Nevertheless, one can conceive that a course at Harvard or Yale would have given him something in his mental equipment that he does not possess. It is conceivable that his critical work and his literary judgments would have been of a sounder kind, if in youth he had sat at the feet of experts in intellectual drill. To appreciate what is lacking in him, one need but lay some of his work alongside that of Matthew Arnold, or of James Russell Lowell-both University men. In these latter great writers one finds on occasion a quality that makes Howells, to speak the truth, seem crude.

So long as men need to learn from each other, and from the generations that are gone; so long as one can learn painting better from the direct tuition of a painter than from books; so long as music needs to be taught; just so long will youths learn best to think and study by sitting at the feet of those who have themselves been long practiced in the art of thinking and of studying.

Instead of considering in these modern times the question of less education, there is a crying need that every man and woman who thinks, and who appreciates the wrong tendencies of the age, should exert all possible influences on behalf of the higher education. Against the floods of demoralizing literature; against the multitude of crude and dangerous ideas of the present day; against the halfthinking which is captivating and misleading so many; against the mental inertia which is upon many minds, and which indisposes them to anything more than indifferentism, we need to place the bulwarks of the highest education. are proud of the fact that we live in a

We