For years, in common with the great majority of American citizens, I had believed that the Spanish West Indies must break loose from Spain some day, but had hoped that the question might be adjourned until the middle or end of the twentieth century. For I knew well that the separation of Cuba from Spain would be followed, after no great length of time, by efforts for her annexation to the United States, and that if such annexation of Cuba should ever occur, she must come in as a State; that there is no use in considering any other form of government for an outlying dominion so large and so near; that there is no other way of annexing a dependency so fully developed, and that, even if there were, the rivalry of political parties contending for electoral votes would be sure to insist on giving her statehood. I dreaded the addition to our country of a million and a half of citizens whose ability to govern themselves was exceedingly doubtful, to say nothing of helping to govern our Union on the mainland. The thought of senators and representatives to be chosen by such a constituency to reside at Washington and to legislate for the whole country, filled me with dismay. Especially was the admission of Cuba to statehood a fearful prospect just at that time, when we had so many difficult questions to meet in the exercise of the suffrage. I never could understand then, and cannot understand now, what Senator Morgan of Alabama, who once had the reputation of being the strongest representative from the South, could be thinking of when he was declaiming in the Senate, first in behalf of the "oppressed Cubans," and next in favor of measures which tended to add them to the United States, and so to create a vast commonwealth largely made up of negroes and mulattos accustomed to equality with the whites, almost within musket-shot of the negroes and mulattos of the South, from whom the constituents of Mr. Morgan were at that very moment withholding the right of suffrage. I could not see then, and I cannot see now, how he could possibly be blind to the fact that if Cuba ever becomes a State of our Union, she will soon begin to look with sympathy on those whom she will consider her "oppressed colored brethren" in the South; and that she will, just as inevitably, make common cause with them at Washington, and perhaps in some other places, and possibly not always by means so peaceful as orating under the roof of the Capitol.