A casual inspection of the above table of imports to Cuba, covering only a portion of the articles taken from us by the Cubans, shows at once what the demands of the Island are for even the simplest necessities beyond bare existence. The million and a half people of the Island want our flour, our lard and pork, our oil, our barbed wire--our soldiers found samples of it strung around San Juan hill,--our manufactures of leather, our household furniture of all kinds, our locomotives and cars and steel rails, our saws and mechanics' tools, our stationary engines and boilers, our lumber in its various shapes for framing and building, our locks and hinges and nails, our corn and beans and potatoes; our coal, our street cars and carriages, and any and every kind of the manifold things we produce in this country for the comfort and convenience and economy of mankind. In part exchange for these things, we get from Cuba sugar and tobacco, and control the markets of the world in these products; mahogany and all manner of beautiful hard woods; bananas and cocoanuts and fruits, pleasing to the palate and wholesome to the health; honey from the flowers; glycerine, no less sweet, from the fats of cattle; manganese and molasses; cigars and coffee; beeswax and birds, and the vast fields of tropical wealth and luxuries for the millions of our colder clime scarcely yet touched. The golden dream of Columbus and his followers, when they beheld for the first time the purple peaks of the strange land rising out of the sea before them, are as poverty and nightmare in comparison with what is actual and real, for the more material age of the twentieth century. The greatest obstacle in the way of Cuban commerce, and the peculiar disadvantage under which the Island laboured was in a large measure attributable to the fact that Spain compelled Cuba to purchase merchandise in Spain which could have been bought in other markets at prices far below the figures which Cuba was forced by these discriminating duties to pay to Spanish merchants and manufacturers. The most glaring illustration of this may be seen by reference to the following table of Spanish imports into Cuba in 1896, which the author has prepared from the report of the Bureau of Statistics in relation to Spanish trade with Cuba and the West Indies: