Majesty, I believe that the bonds of union will be still more strengthened; but if the fate of nations brings to this land a day pregnant with such circumstances as to threaten its loss, their national honor and interest alike would demand that every recourse and means be exhausted, without saving anything. If, even then, fortune should abandon us, we should at least leave it written in history that our departure from America corresponded to the heroic story of its acquisition." CHAPTER XXV The era of Cuban history which embraced part of the seventeenth, the eighteenth, and part of the nineteenth centuries, and which we have endeavored to review in this volume, presents a striking and almost unique contrast to the customary course of human affairs. The normal order of civic development begins with the rise and confirmation of nationality, and thence proceeds to international relationships and cosmopolitan interests and activities. Such was the record of other American states which grew up contemporaneously with Cuba. Such was notably the course of the United States of North America. In their colonial period they were intensely local, parochial, in sentiment and spirit. In their revolutionary era they began to manifest a national entity. It was not until long after their establishment of national independence that they fully realized their international status. In Cuba the order was reversed. At first, as a colony of triumphant and masterful Spain, the island had neither national sentiment nor international interests. In the second stage, however, it became a pawn in the great international game which was being played between declining Spain and her increasingly powerful neighbors, actually for a time passing from Spanish to British possession, and often being regarded as likely to pass permanently into the hands of some other power than Spain. These circumstances had a marked effect upon the whole genius of the Cuban people. It gave them international vision before they had learned to discern themselves even as a potential nation. It gave them a degree of cosmopolitanism such as few comparable colonies have ever known. It divorced them in sentiment from the Mother Country to an exceptional degree. They were made to feel that Spain meant little or nothing to them. She had planted them, it is true. But she had given them little cultivation, little protection. She had looked to them for more help for herself than she had herself given to them. She was unable to save them from the danger of being passed from hand to hand, from owner to owner.