Brothers, you veterans of the Cuban War, crafty men excited you, amused you, confused you, then used you and despised you so thoroughly that they gave some of you horse meat while in camp within five miles of Washington on your way to the war—so some of your number have said—and gave you on the battlefield embalmed meat canned years before, meat that even fizzed with a vile odor when the point of a knife-blade was thrust into the can, meat unfit for a mangy cur or a buzzard. Excited you? Yes, that is exactly what happened to you. A man is pretty thoroughly excited and confused—isn’t he?—when he is singing “My Country! ’tis of Thee!” at the very time that country is feeding him meat unfit for a dog. Mr. Roosevelt confesses that a special effort was made to excite you, and he also tells us some other things:[165] “And from the moment when the regiment began to gather, _the higher officers kept instilling_ into those under them the spirit of eagerness for action, of stern determination to _grasp at death_ rather than forfeit honor ... fever sickened and weakened them so that many of them died from it during the few months following their return.... We found all our dead and all the badly wounded.... One of our own dead and most of the Spanish dead had been found by the vultures before we got to them; and their bodies were mangled, their eyes and wounds being torn.... A very touching incident happened in the improvised open-air hospital after the fight, where the wounded were lying.... One of them suddenly began to hum, ‘My Country, ’Tis of Thee,’ and one by one the others joined in the chorus, which swelled out through the tropic, where the victors lay in camp beside their dead.” How lovely—so perfectly sweet of them. So extremely touching—“_grasping_ at death.” The buzzards tore out the eyes of some of the brave young fellows and feasted on them; the grave-worms got some of them; vile diseases sickened many thousands of them; and many of them came home to “their _dear_ country”—so poor in purse that they had to beg on the streets of Philadelphia, New York and elsewhere. Their dear country. They had been “grasping at death” for their dear country. Remember: The buzzards and the battlefield grave-worms did not get the “prominent people” who actually own this dear country. “Higher officers” can not instill or fill a banker or a manufacturer so full of the “spirit of eagerness” that he becomes eager to “grasp at death” and have his eyeballs ripped out and his shattered body eaten by vultures. These men were not excited—not in the least. These men were thinking. These were not “grasping at death”; they were grasping for Cuba. Cuba looked good and you looked easy. These men needed you in their business. And they got you, you Cuban War veterans.