The most serious revolt against the Spaniards occurred in 1868, consequent upon the distracted condition of Spain during the revolutionary proceedings which exiled Isabella II. The leader of this revolt, Carlos de Cespedes, was subsequently elected president of a republic which the insurgents finally set up, and for ten years, during which at least seventy–five thousand Spanish soldiers perished in the island, and the natives suffered every conceivable indignity from the “peninsulars,” the war was waged, only to be concluded by a deceitful promise of reforms which were never granted. General Martinez Campos, then the Captain–General of Cuba, and authorized representative of Spain, signed the “capitulation” of El Zanjon in 1878, by which the insurgents were induced to surrender, under a pledge that their demands should be acceded to; but Señor Canovas, then Prime Minister of Spain, refused to recognise this treaty, and so all their terrible sacrifices came to naught. It was but natural that the patriots should feel resentful; but they remained quiescent for seventeen years, at the end of which period, in February, 1895, the long–smouldering embers of revolt again burst into flame. [Illustration] CHAPTER XXIV. CUBA’S FIGHT FOR FREEDOM. While it may be difficult to write a dispassionate account of a war in which the sympathies of the writer have been ardently enlisted on one side as against the other, and to paint a picture which lacks the perspective afforded by the lapse of time, yet an attempt will be made to present such an account and such a picture as will stand the test of unprejudiced criticism. The object of the insurgents during the ten years’ war was to secure reforms in the national administration, actual representation in the Cortes, and amelioration of their intolerable condition. They secured nothing, for though eventually granted the privilege of representation, in 1878, this privilege was nullified by the representatives being mainly selected from the ranks of the peninsulars themselves! And now, in 1895, having in mind the duplicity by which they had been tricked, the Cuban patriots aimed at nothing less than _independence_! This idea of actual and complete severance from Spain they have consistently persisted in from the very first; and when the end came, finding them impoverished and starving, their ranks decimated by war and disease, they still clung to the rock of independence, upon which they purposed to found their long–cherished republic.