The development of American policy toward Cuba is an important and interesting part of the history of the United States as well as of Cuba. The progressively significant utterances of the younger Adams, of Clay and of Forsythe, culminating years afterward in those of Cleveland and McKinley, form one of the most consistent, logical and convincing chapters in American diplomatic history. It is marred, we must confess, by some adventitious excrescences, chiefly contributed by Calhoun and Pierre Soule. Yet even these, deplorable as they ever must be regarded, fail to destroy the symmetry of the whole. It is a chapter, indeed, which more than any other is comprehensive and expository of the whole spirit and trend of American international transactions. Cuba has also been intimately connected with three great issues of American domestic politics, as well as with that supreme principle of her foreign policy. The first of these was that of human slavery. From the end of the second war with Great Britain to the beginning of the Civil War that issue dominated American politics and therefore determined largely the American attitude toward Cuba. The pro-slavery influences, which were generally paramount at Washington, resisted all efforts, which otherwise might have been successful, to draw Cuba into the community of republics freed from Spanish rule in Central and South America, because of unwillingness to have her become, like them, free soil; and subsequently the same influences planned and plotted and fought for Cuban annexation to the United States, either by conquest or by purchase, in order that she might thus be added to the slave-holding domain. On the other hand, the anti-slavery party, because of its abhorrence of these schemes, opposed the manifestation of what would have been a quite legitimate and benevolent interest in Cuban affairs. For forty years Cuba was a pawn in the game between these contending factions. Of course this issue was disposed of by the Civil War and the consequent abolition of slavery in the United States. Another issue was that of expansion. There was from the first a considerable party in the United States that favored the widest possible acquisition of territory, sometimes quite regardless of the means, and it early fixed upon Cuba as what Jefferson and the younger Adams had declared it to be, the most interesting and most natural addition that could be made to the federal system. There was also a party that was resolutely opposed to any further extension of American territorial sovereignty, whether by conquest or purchase. Sometimes the one and sometimes the other of these prevailed in American politics, and not infrequently Cuba was the chief issue between them. Ultimately it was over Cuba that their greatest conflict was waged; resulting in a compromise, under which the United States on the one hand renounced all designs of annexing Cuba, and on the other hand did annex other still more extensive territories.