McKinley, during this period, opposed intervention, but the war party, supported by the Hearst papers, was growing rapidly. Our able minister in Spain, General Woodford, was also opposed to our intervention. Congress, however, held the opposite attitude. A senator said to Assistant Secretary of State Day: "Day, doesn't your President know where the war-declaring power is lodged? Tell him that if he doesn't do something, Congress will exercise the power." Congressman Boutelle, who was opposed to the war, says that forty or fifty Republican members of Congress held a caucus and sent a committee to the President stating that unless he asked for a declaration of war, they would propose a resolution for war and carry it through. Secretary of War Alger, who was a notorious spoilsman, said to a senator: "I want you to advise the President to declare war. He is making a great mistake. He is in danger of ruining himself and the Republican party by standing in the way of the people's wishes. Congress will declare war in spite of him. He'll get run over and the party with him." Rhodes, in "McKinley and Roosevelt Administrations," on page 64, says: "McKinley feared a rupture in his own party, and on account of that fear, had not the nerve and power to resist the pressure for war. We may rest assured that if Mark Hanna had been President, there would have been no war with Spain." McKinley was opposed to the war up to the last of March, 1898. Only two members of his cabinet were in favor of war. Also, the Vice-President was against it, as was Mark Hanna, the Speaker of the House, and nearly all the leading Republicans of the Senate. On March 29, 1898, McKinley sent his ultimatum to Spain demanding the complete abandonment of the concentration policy, the granting of an armistice to Cuba, and the opening of peace negotiations through himself with the insurgents. Spain replied granting the complete abandonment of the concentration policy and did not refuse to grant the armistice, but told our minister, General Woodford, that she would gladly grant it, if the Cubans, who were the resistors, asked for it, for Spain could not first offer it. Our minister at Madrid then cabled McKinley that the Spanish government and people wished to settle the difficulty without war, and that in a few months' time, he would "get peace in Cuba, with justice to Cuba and protection to our great American interests." Let us say, for example, that Japan had sent an ultimatum to McKinley during the Philippine insurrection, demanding that he change his policy of coercion and grant an armistice to the Philippines. Such a demand would have been treated with contempt, yet that is what we demanded of Spain.