To many people the callousness of Spaniards to suffering and their disregard of the rights of others have seemed the greatest mystery. Why is it that they still cling so tenaciously to the pleasures of the bull ring? Why was it that they appeared so indifferent to the miseries of the Cuban reconcentrados? In the light of the influence of war on the sympathies these questions present no difficulty. Clear also does it become why the Spaniards possess as little patriotism as the Chinese. Training for centuries in the belief that the most honorable occupation is the killing and plundering of enemies or the filling of positions in church and state that obviate the necessity of earning a livelihood by honest toil is not fitted to inspire a keen sense of justice or a lively fellow-feeling. When people have been plundered for centuries by a greedy bureaucratic despotism they can not persuade themselves that it is their duty to protect their oppressors from foreign or domestic assailants. What they are most interested in is an opportunity to get a living. Whether the honor of their country is at stake, or whether there is threatened the loss of the last remnant of a colonial empire that has cost them blood and treasure beyond estimate, they are certain to be as indifferent as the victims of a slave driver to the misfortunes that have overtaken him. Some friends of Spain have been inclined to regard the loss of these colonies as the culmination of her misfortunes. We can not but regard it as the beginning of better days. Although Spain has not been engaged in war on an extensive scale for a long time, her efforts to retain the control of a people anxious to be delivered from her incapacity and despotism have tended to keep alive the barbarous feelings and traditions of the past. The Cubans and Porto Ricans were not governed for their own benefit like the colonists of Great Britain, but for the benefit of rapacious politicians and traders and manufacturers in Spain. In the colonial administration the former sought easy employment and speedy fortune. In the colonial commercial regulations the latter found an artificial support for trade and manufactures that could not have survived without them. By discriminations, Spanish millers, for instance, were able to import wheat, turn it into flour, and sell it to the colonists at a price scandalously in excess of that charged for the American product. Sometimes the trouble to grind the wheat was not taken. After it had been imported into Spain it was shipped to the colonies, and upon them was thrown the expense of needless transportation and the profits of superfluous middlemen.