[Illustration: JOSÉ LUIS AZCARATA SECRETARY OF JUSTICE] As a natural result of the revolution started a few days before, the two additional elections ordered by the Supreme Court, were necessarily postponed, since the island had been thrown into a turmoil by the action of General Gomez. They were, however, afterwards held, and resulted in decided Conservative majorities, which were carried by the electoral boards to the Central Electoral Junta, presided over by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Señor Pichardo, and justified that body in announcing the election of General Menocal to a second term as President. In spite of this decision of the courts, which General Menocal had previously agreed to abide by, the insurrectionary elements of the Liberal party still insisted that General Menocal's second term was secured through deliberate and carefully planned frauds and intimidation of the voters at the polls. The fact is that the election laws of Cuba forbid and prevent any soldier from standing even in the doorway of a polling place. He cannot approach nearer than the corner of the building in which the votes are being deposited, nor can he leave his post and come closer to the polls, unless some serious disturbance, where lives are threatened, occurs, with which the police of the district cannot cope. Since the minority is represented during the time of voting, and during the count by a man selected for that purpose, no fraud could well be perpetrated without the consent of someone responsible to the opposition. The army officers who had been led by José Miguel Gomez to revolt, had been captured with arms in their hands, fighting to overthrow the constitutional government of the island; a purpose of which they had made no secret. They were therefore guilty of sedition and treason, and were subject to trial by court martial and to capital punishment upon conviction of their crime. They were thus tried, and some were condemned to death and others to long terms of imprisonment; but the extreme sentence was never executed upon one of them, while many of the prison sentences were shortened and some of the men were pardoned outright. This generous action of President Menocal's was performed through the same spirit of magnanimity that moved Estrada Palma to like clemency, years before; and it was as ill requited. Some of the men whom he had thus saved from the gallows or the firing squad promptly resumed criminal conspiracies against him; while the Liberal party as a whole demanded that the pardoned officers should be at once reinstated in the army with full rank and back pay for the time which they had spent in insurrection and in prison, and railed against President Menocal for not granting that additional act of grace!