Moreover, the nation had just escaped a terrible catastrophe at the last general election; the ignorant, careless, and perverse vote having gone almost solidly for a financial policy which would have wrecked us temporarily and disgraced us eternally. Time will, no doubt, develop a more conservative sentiment in the States where this vote for evil was cast; as civilization deepens and advances, better ideas will doubtless grow stronger; but it is sure that the addition of Cuba to the United States, if it ever comes, means the adding of a vast illiterate mass of voters to those who at that election showed themselves so dangerous. On all these accounts I had felt very anxious to put off the whole Cuban question until our Republic should become so much larger and so much more mature that the addition of a few millions of Spanish-Americans would be of but small account in the total vote of the country. Then, too, I had little sympathy with aspirations for what Spanish revolutionists call freedom, and no admiration at all for Central American republics. I had officially examined one of them thoroughly, had known much of others, and had no belief in the capacity of people for citizenship who prefer to carry on government by pronunciamientos, who never acknowledge the rights of majorities, who are ready to start civil war on the slightest pretext, and who, when in power, exercise a despotism more persistent and cruel than any since Nero and Caligula. No Russian autocrat, claiming to govern by divine right, has ever dared to commit the high-handed cruelties which are common in sundry West Indian and equatorial republics. I felt that the great thing was to gain time before doing anything which might result in the admission of the millions trained under such influences into all the rights, privileges, and powers of American citizenship.