But the tax collector was there. The Castilian despoiler was there. The hand of the oppressor was laid heavily upon the Cubans, and they died at the edge of the sword through two hundred years of tyranny. And in that day when the American Republic had attained its growth, had reached its manhood, there was a protest against a continuance of cruelty. The Republic demanded that the Don cease from troubling; that the Cubans be rescued. President McKinley waited until the united voice of his countrymen convinced him that they had surely arrived at years of national discretion, and that their challenge was not the utterance of a passionate mood but the expression of an unalterable determination. And then he issued his order to Spain: “Leave the West Indies forever!” There was reason in the demand. Cuba lay so close to our shores that her continual suffering, the outrages perpetrated upon her people, became a scandal in the eyes of the Republic. It was like a strong man standing unmoved while a child is being beaten by a bully. Besides, one consequence of such rule as the Spaniards maintained was a perilous sanitary condition in the cities that traded continually with the ports of the States. American cities had learned the rules of health, and had banished yellow fever and the cholera. But what profit in that provision if a ship sailed across the narrow sea and spread the plague upon our shores? There was reason in self defense for the notice to quit. That fundamental principle of the nation called the “Monroe doctrine” forbade any power in the old world from extending its rule in the new. It is but a logical sequence of that system that an old world power which cannot in two hundred years complete its subjugation of a new world people has never had a right it could maintain here; that no king from Europe had title to soil in the Western hemisphere if he could not perfect that title in that lapse of time. And as a policy of the nation and the interest of the nation joined in dictating the action, the Spaniards were commanded to retire. The time had come when President McKinley could make his case good even in the courts of old-world kings. And there was not a murmur of protest from a palace abroad when Madrid received that portentous command. But there was another reason—another consideration which men too often overlook, yet which was of the most stupendous value to the Republic. War with a foreign power would reunite a country divided by civil strife, and stubbornly, ill-temperedly refusing to perfect its peace.