In such circumstances Blanco strove for the last time to defeat the Cuban national desire for independence. He probably realized in advance the certainty of failure. He had been Captain-General before, succeeding Campos after the Ten Years' War and during the Little War, and he must have known the temper of the Cuban people and the unwillingness of the great majority of them to accept the delusive scheme of autonomy which Spain was fitfully offering, and in which he himself never had any real faith and which, indeed, he had never favored. But he was a loyal Spanish soldier, of the better type, and he was personally as little odious to the Cubans as any Spanish Captain General could be, for he had never been notably tyrannical or cruel. The decree of autonomy was adopted by the Spanish government on November 25, 1897, largely because of the urgings--to use no stronger term--of the United States, and was promulgated by Blanco in Cuba early in December. The scheme provided for universal suffrage; a bi-cameral Legislature consisting of a Council of eighteen elected members and seventeen appointed by the crown, and a House containing one elected member for each 25,000 inhabitants. To this Legislature were nominally committed most of the functions of government. But it was provided that "The supreme government of the colony shall be exercised by a Governor-General." That was the crux of the whole matter. That made the Captain-General, or Governor-General as he was thereafter to be called, the practical dictator of the island. To this entirely illusive and delusive scheme, the remnant of the Autonomist party gave adherence with a devotion worthy of a better cause. The Reformist faction of the Spanish party also, though not so readily, approved it. The intransigent Constitutionalists would have none of it. Tenuous and futile as were its apparent concessions to the Cubans, they were far too much for these insular Bourbons to be willing to grant. They socially ostracised Blanco, and before the system was to go into effect they called a convention at Havana to protest and to foment against it. The president of the party, the Cuban-born Marquis de Apezteguia, was indeed in favor of giving autonomy a trial. But he could not control the party whose other members were almost unanimously against it. They had defeated and expelled Campos. Now they resolved to do the same with Blanco. At the convention Apezteguia was rebuked and repudiated, though left in office. A telegram of sympathy was sent to Weyler. Speeches were made denouncing the United States, its President and its Congress. A resolution was adopted condemning and opposing autonomy, and another declaring that Constitutionalists would not vote nor take any part in public affairs. [Illustration: ANTONIO GOVIN