EFFECTS OF THE WAR IN SPAIN. 403 head of 15,000 to take one starving city, and would be cabling for reinforcements. This inexplicable ignorance of the helplessness of the insurgents and of the solid strength of Spain in Cuba led to the naval demonstrations in which the first precious weeks of the war were wasted.

after month, theyhadseen the transports leaving their shores, conveying across the Atlantic thousands of their sons to reinforce the army of Cuba. They knew that these youngmen, often mereboys, were being drafted away to fill the ranks of garrisons that were wastednot so much by war as by the pestilentialclimate of the far-off colony. From the War Ministry in Madrid, after each mail from Havana, there went a heavy post of official letters that sent to hundreds of homes the news of more deaths in Cuba. So heavy was this unceasing toll of young lives that elder men of the reserves were at last called out from farm and mine and shop, to bring up the home battalions to somethinglike their nominal strength. Once war was declared, this fearful drain on the Spanish population practically came to an end. It is true that more reservists were called out, but they were for duty in the coast cities,and in the Canaries. No attempt was made after the first week to despatch any more troops to Cuba. The reinforcements destined at a later date for the Philippines were a mere handful, and did not go beyond Suez. No further war taxes were levied than had been collected for two years, for the limit of taxation had been reached, and the Bank of Spain found a sum of money, with the help of speculative French financiers, to reinforce the help given to the treasury by the national subscription. Thus the war, far from bringing fresh hardships on the home population, mitigated to some extent those from which it had suffered so long, that they were accepted as normal conditions of life. An American lawyer, who knew Madrid well,and visited it during the summer of 1898, writes in his record of his stay in the Spanish capital at the very time when Santiago de Cuba was besieged by sea and land:"Icould not perceive any difference in the appearanceof the people of Madrid or of the place, owing to the war, except, perhaps, in the increased interest in the newspapers." By the way, it may be noted that, though known to be an American, he was everywhere received with kindly courtesy.

And there was another reason for the misdirection of the naval campaign, which in another way was equally discreditable to the IntelligenceDepartment at Washington. There was a strangeignorance in official quartersas to the actual condition of the Spanish navy. It was not evenknown till after the navalbattle off Santiago that the Cristobal Colon, lying at St. Vincent, had not one of her heavy guns on board. Ships that were unfinished in Spanish dockyards were supposed to be ready to reinforce the Cape de Verde squadron at a day's notice. There was a kind of semi-panic in the many great cities of the States on or near the Atlantic seaboard, and the accepted theory was that Cervera might attempt a bombardment even of New York itself. It was not realised— as it shouldhave been realised— that evenif the Spanish admiral succeeded in silencing the batteries and passing the mine fields of some Atlantic city, he could only do serious damage by emptying his magazines, and that when the day was done he would find himself inhostile waters,short of ammunition andcoal, and at the mercy of the American Atlantic fleet. The very reasons that made the American Government forbid Sampson to engage the batteries of Havana lest some of his ships should be so injuredas tobe unfit for sometime to appearinthe fighting line ought to have convinced them that Cervera could not run similar risks without incurring still greater dangers. Those whohad clamoured most loudlyfor war were now afraid of its being imught to their own doors, and so Schley'scruisers were kept at Hampton Roads to act as a coastguard, and Sampson's battleships were held within call in West Indian waters. So the American navy waited for the Spanish squadron instead of going in search of it; and at a moment when what wasneeded to force the Spanish Government to sue for peace, orcollapse under a revolution, was a menace to Spain itself, the people of the Spanish peninsula wereleft to feel only indirectly,and at a distance, the effects of the war.

It was the threat to despatch Commodore Watson's squadron to European waters that first brought home to men in Spain the feeling that they might be directly affected by whattill then was for them only a new phase of a tedious colonial war. The government found itself face to face with a possible revolution. The mer-■1. iiits andmanufacturers of Barcelona declared In one sense the outbreak of hostilities witn the United States had actually brought relief to the people of Spain. For three years, month