I do not think sufficient attention has been paid by students of the Cuban question to facts wholly unconnected with bad government and of a purely economic nature. First and foremost of these is the depreciation in the commercial value of local produce, especially the loss on sugar, which is mainly due to the popularity and cheapness of beetroot sugar on the continent of Europe. Without undue entering into details, I would point out that Cuba is in this respect going through precisely the same financial and commercial crisis as the other and better-governed West Indian Islands. The tobacco trade, I hear, is less flourishing than it used to be. It has to contend with the prodigious development which has recently taken place in the tobacco markets of Asia Minor, Egypt, Europe, and the United States. In a word, Cuba has been doing very badly now for over twenty years, and families which were not very long ago amongst the richest of our period, are now paupers, eager to sell their few remaining jewels, bric-à-brac, and even their fans, lace, and brocades, to the passing stranger. To add to the general distress came the completion of the abolition of slavery, with its usual result--the negroes refused to work. Coolies were imported, but the climate did not suit them. White labour has not been tried, for the simple reason that it is a foredoomed failure. Masters who have had to deal with negroes all their lives are never able to manage poor whites. Hundreds of plantations have gone out of cultivation, and thousands of half savage, coloured folk, have gone to swell in the all-pervading anarchy which the Spanish Government is not strong enough to suppress. Meanwhile the rebellion has absorbed an incredible amount of Spanish capital, and drained the mother country of hundreds of thousands of young men, the great majority of whom will never see their homes again. Cuba, in her present condition, is Spain's ruin, and it would have been well for the Spaniards if they had sold the island half a century ago. "Cuba," said a Spanish writer the other day, "is a sort of bottomless waste-paper basket. The women of Cadiz and its neighbourhood hold the very name of Cuba in execration, they have seen so many of their sons and sweethearts depart thither, never to return."