Nor were the cities and towns exempted. Trade and commerce at a standstill; the few sickly manufacturing industries which at the best struggled under the most adverse conditions closed, the ruined buildings emphasising the scene of desolation. In Havana, the wharves and numerous large warehouses were empty, or converted into rendezvous and hospitals for Spanish troops. Hungry and discouraged, the native population stood listlessly on the streets and in the public places. At each station the railroad trains were boarded by half-starving women or children begging for bread or coppers. The principal signs of life were exhibited by the Spanish soldiers, who, with their blue cotton uniforms and Mauser rifles, seemed to form the greater part of the population of the cities and towns, while at the small country railroad stations the squads of woe-begone soldiers alongside the blockhouses comprised the only living relief to miles of waste. The Cuban railways, like all other implements of industry in the unfortunate Island, show evidences of the conflict. Stations burned, bridges destroyed, tracks torn up, freight-cars made into portable blockhouses, locomotives blown to pieces, and passenger-cars dilapidated and dingy. In short, a country more systematically pillaged, more infamously deprived of its resources, more wantonly plundered of its revenues, and a population more completely deprived of its rights by those who had every reason to foster and protect a valuable possession cannot be found recorded in ancient or modern history. Cuba, as it was left at the close of this year by the Spanish, who to the last moment seemed loth to leave the emaciated body which their inordinate greed had thus reduced, presents a picture so sad and sorrowful that, for the sake of our common humanity, it is better to draw a curtain over the past and direct attention to the happier omens which point to the possibilities of the future.