repressed and thwarted the sovereign aspirations of the Cuban People, and also, more gratefully, the causes and forces which inevitably, in the slow fullness of time, achieved their ultimate fulfilment in the secure establishment of the Cuban Nation.

The origin of the Cuban People presents a striking historical and ethnological anomaly. The early settlers of the island, and therefore the progenitors of the present Cuban people, were beyond question the flower of the Spanish race at the very time when that race was at the height of its marvellous puissance and efficience. The Sixteenth Century was the Golden Age of Spain, and they were conspicuous representatives of those who made it so who implanted the genius of their time upon the hospitable soil of the great West Indian island. That rule has been, indeed, common to the colonial enterprises of all lands. The best men become the pioneers. Colonization implies adventure, and adventure implies courage, enterprise, endurance, vision, prudence, the very essential elements of both individual and civic greatness. Strong men, not weaklings, are the founders of new settlements. Even in those lands which were largely populated involuntarily, as penal settlements, the same rule holds good; because many of the convict exiles were merely political proscripts, who in fact were men of virtue, light and leading, often superior to those who banished them.

There is fruit for almost endless thought and speculation in the circumstance that so many of the early Cuban settlers, as indeed of all the Spanish explorers and conquerors of the Sixteenth Century, came from the two Iberian Provinces of Estremadura and Seville. They were, and are, two of the most widely contrasting provinces of Spain. The one a rude, rugged, half sterile region of swineherds and mountaineers, poverty-stricken and remote; the other plethoric with the wealth of agriculture, industry and commerce, and endowed above most regions of the world with the treasures of learning and art. Yet it was from barren, impoverished and uncultured Estremadura that there came Cortez, Pizarro, Balboa, De Soto, and their compeers and followers. We might speculate upon the questions whether great men were thus numerously produced by nature in that region by way of compensation for the paucity and poverty of other products; and whether it was because of their innate genius or because of their desire to seek a better land than their own, that they became the adventurers that they were. The other province which most contributed to the founding of Cuba had from time immemorial been noted for its wealth and culture. In the days of the Cæsars it had been the favorite colonial resort of the plutocracy and aristocracy of Rome, and it had been the birthplace of the Emperors Hadrian, Trajan and Theodosius. Under the Catholic Kings it was the capital and the metropolis of Spain and the chief mart of her world-wide commerce. Indeed it would not be difficult to establish the proposition that it was with the removal of the capital from Seville to Madrid, and the change of national and international policy which was inseparably associated with that removal, that the decline of Spain began.

Cuba was thus in her foundation the fortunate recipient of the rugged and masterful spirit of Estremadura, and of the elements of government and of social grace and intellectual power which Seville could so well and so abundantly supply; and these two contrasting yet by no means incompatible elements became characteristic of the Cuban people; complementarily contributing to the development of a national character quite distinct from that of the Mother Country or that of any other of her offshoots. For the Cuban people and their social organism, separated far from Spain, though subject to her rule, retained largely unimpaired their pristine vigor, and avoided sharing in the degeneracy and decline which befell the Peninsula soon after the malign Hapsburg influence became dominant in its affairs of state; a decline which in the Seventeenth Century became one of the most distressing and pathetic tragedies in the drama of the world.

It was an interesting and a significant circumstance, too, that while Spain was resplendent and exultant in the Golden Age of the Sixteenth Century, Cuba remained intellectually dormant and inactive, and that when at the end of the Eighteenth Century Spain reached her nadir of degradation, Cuba began to rise to intellectual puissance. While Spain was great, it was to be said of Cuba stat nominis umbra; but when Spain declined, Cuba arose to take her place, insistent that the race and its letters, at least, should not universally fall into decay.

It is one of the anomalies of Cuban history that while the island was denied the enjoyment of even those incipient and inchoate intimations of potential nationality which were granted to other Spanish provinces, such as Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia and Peru, it was nevertheless, perhaps more than any other, involved from early times in the international complications and conflicts of Spain. At least equally with the mainland coasts Cuba's shores were ravaged by pirates and freebooters, and were attacked or menaced by the commissioned fleets of hostile powers. Her insular character and her geographical position doubtless accounted for this in great degree, as did also the purblind policy of Spain in failing to give her the care and protection which were lavished upon other no more worthy possessions.

So it came to pass that for a time Cuba was actually conquered and seized by an alien power and was forcibly separated from Spanish sovereignty; and that for many years thereafter she was the object of covetous desire and indeed of almost incessant intrigue for acquisition by two of Spain's chief rivals and adversaries. For nearly half a century Great Britain and France were frequently, almost continuously, each planning to annex Cuba as a colonial possession, either by conquest in war or through barter or purchase in time of peace. It was not until a third great power arose and asserted in unmistakable terms its paramount interest in the island, only a little while previous to our own time, that such designs were reluctantly forsaken.

It was the interesting fortune of Cuba, therefore, not only to engage the early and earnest diplomatic interest of the United States in her behalf, but also to afford to that country occasion for the conception, formulation and promulgation of perhaps the most important of all the fundamental principles of its state policy in international affairs. We have suggested, in anticipation of the narrative, that Cuba was largely to be credited with the inception of the impulse for the prompt construction of the Isthmian Canal. In a far more valid and direct sense Cuba suggested the enunciation of the Monroe Doctrine. It is true that in relation first to Louisiana and then to Florida there had previously been preliminary hints at and approximations to that Doctrine. But those were territories contiguous with our own and already marked by the United States for eventual annexation and incorporation. Cuba, on the contrary, was entirely detached from our domain, and while there were then those who anticipated and desired her ultimate annexation, there was no such confident and determined resolution to that effect that there was in the case of the other regions named. Cuba was therefore the first detached country, not destined for annexation, to which the United States extended and applied the fundamental principle which was later developed into the Monroe Doctrine. We may not doubt that the Monroe Doctrine would have been put forward, even had it not been for Cuba. We may not deny nor dispute that it was because of Cuba and concerning Cuba that the