This loss of their temporary capital did not perceptibly weaken the Cuban position; indeed the patriot cause steadily grew in strength and numbers. The entire jurisdiction of Holguin revolted against Spanish authority, on October 28, and the inhabitants, in large numbers, rushed to take up arms with the patriots. A week later Camaguey followed the example of Holguin. The Spanish government both at home and in Cuba was in the position of a man sitting on a couch under which had been stored a quantity of bombs, all timed to go off at irregular intervals, and from which position there was no escape. They did not know which way to jump. The high officials in both countries lived in an uncertainty as to events in Cuba which must have been nerve racking. Indeed--to mix our metaphors--they never knew where the fever of revolutions was scheduled to break out next. If they succeeded in getting it under control in one place, and began to feel a bit secure against an epidemic, the next morning they found what to them seemed a new eruption, and one which they had not been able to anticipate. They conquered, or apparently subdued, the patriots in one portion of the Island, and immediately those in another burst forth into active opposition to what the Spanish government would have termed law and order, but which the insurgents called by the less pleasant terms of cruelty and unjust oppressions. And occasionally, as we have seen, there glimmered in some Spanish intelligence a faint doubt as to the efficacy of their usual methods, and then for a very short time the authorities would try temporizing. But the patriots had not suffered for generations from Spanish misrule without having learned to mistrust the wiles of their oppressors, and they viewed with more or less cynicism any surface indications of a less tyrannous rule.