End of the Revolt by Promises of Reform.--Polavieja returned to Spain, and was succeeded by Gen. Primo de Rivera, who arrived in the spring of 1897. The Spanish troops had suffered several recent reverses and the country swarmed with insurgents. The policy of Primo de Rivera was to gain by diplomacy where the energy of his predecessor had failed. In July, 1897, an amnesty proclamation was issued, and in August the governor-general opened negotiations with Aguinaldo, whose headquarters were now in the mountains of Angat in Bulacan. Primo de Rivera urged the home government to make some reforms, which would greatly lessen the political importance of the friars. He was vehemently opposed by the latter, but it was probably upon the promise of reform that Aguinaldo and his fellow-insurgents agreed, for the payment of 1,700,000 pesos, to surrender their arms, dismiss the insurgent forces, and themselves retire from the Islands. This agreement was made, and on December 27, 1897, Aguinaldo left the port of Sual for Hongkong. The Spanish Misrule Ended.--Conditions in the provinces still continued very unsatisfactory, and in its very last hours the Spanish government lost the remnant of its prestige with the people by a massacre in Calle Camba, Binondo, of a company of Bisayan sailors. Ten days after this occurrence a revolt blazed out on the island of Cebu. Had events taken their course, what would have been the final conclusion of the struggle between Spaniards and Filipinos it is impossible to say. On the 25th day of April the United States declared war upon Spain, and the first day of May an American fleet reached Manila harbor, and in the naval fight off Cavite, Spanish dominion, which had lasted with only one brief interruption for 332 years, was broken. CHAPTER XIII. AMERICA AND THE PHILIPPINES. Beginning of a New Era.--With the passing of the Spanish sovereignty to the Americans, a new era began in the Philippines. Already the old Spanish rule seems so far removed that we can begin to think of it without feeling and study it without prejudice. Development of the United States of America.--The American nation is the type of the New World. Beginning in a group of colonies, planted half a century later than the settlement of the Philippines, it has had a development unparalleled in the history of states. Although peopled by emigrants from Europe, who rigidly preserved both their purity of race and pride of ancestry, the American colonists, at the end of a century, were far separated in spirit and institutions from the Old World.