No tongue, no pen, can adequately describe the sufferings, the callous cruelties, that ensued when the _reconcentrados_—as these unhappy victims of Weyler’s edicts were teamed—were finally gathered in the cities, where they could be watched by the tyrant’s soldiers. For, though they were assembled by his orders, against their inclinations, having abandoned homes and farms, every means of subsistence, they were left to starve and die with scarcely any effort being made for their relief. First scores, then hundreds, then thousands, starved in the streets, fell and died like dogs; fathers of families were compelled to witness the agonizing sufferings of their children, without the possibility of affording them relief; mothers lost their little ones by slow starvation, while themselves enduring the torments of diseases induced by their condition. One by one, family after family, finally the inhabitants of whole villages and hamlets, perished miserably, and it at last seemed evident to Weyler that his policy would prevail and the insurgents succumb to starvation, if not to powder and bullets. But meanwhile—though the author of all these torments gloated over the miseries he had created, though he grew immensely rich from the plunder of his victims—his soldiers could not prevail against the intrepid insurgents. They hid in caves and swamps, they grew gaunt and weak from starvation, but they still persisted in their determination to resist to the death. So far as possible, through suppression of news, through accounts of victories never achieved, successes never gained, and reports of insurgent atrocities never perpetrated, the Spaniards had misinformed the world at large regarding conditions in Cuba. The Spanish queen, who was concerned with a mother’s solicitude for the throne upon which her boy–king sat; the Spanish people, inured to cruelty through traditions from the past and the bullfights of modern times: the people of the “motherland” of Cuba, gazed complacently upon these unparalleled sufferings of a rebellious population; but the rest of the world finally protested. “This is not war; this is butchery; these atrocities must cease!” was the universal protest. Still, the cause of humanity, while broad as the world and of universal acceptation, at first found no champion. The weeks and months went by, and the _reconcentrados_ died like wild beasts, neglected, spurned, by their captors, apparently forgotten by all fellow–creatures. And yet hands were stretched out to them, hearts were bleeding for them (though vainly, perforce), in a country adjacent to their island, from which it is separated only by a channel less than one hundred miles in width. One hundred miles away, only a few hours’ sail, lay the borders of a nation pledged to the maintenance of human rights and the righting of human wrongs. Why, then, could it not step in and stay the progress of that car of Juggernaut before it was too late?