A PLEA FOR CUBA

[This deliberative oration was delivered by Senator Thurston in the United States Senate on March 24, 1898.  It is recorded in full in the Congressional Record of that date.  Mrs. Thurston died in Cuba.  As a dying request she urged her husband, who was investigating affairs in the island, to do his utmost to induce the United States to intervene—­hence this oration.]

Mr. President, I am here by command of silent lips to speak once and for all upon the Cuban situation.  I shall endeavor to be honest, conservative, and just.  I have no purpose to stir the public passion to any action not necessary and imperative to meet the duties and necessities of American responsibility, Christian humanity, and national honor.  I would shirk this task if I could, but I dare not.  I cannot satisfy my conscience except by speaking, and speaking now.

I went to Cuba firmly believing that the condition of affairs there had been greatly exaggerated by the press, and my own efforts were directed in the first instance to the attempted exposure of these supposed exaggerations.  There has undoubtedly been much sensationalism in the journalism of the time, but as to the condition of affairs in Cuba, there has been no exaggeration, because exaggeration has been impossible.

Under the inhuman policy of Weyler not less than four hundred thousand self-supporting, simple, peaceable, defenseless country people were driven from their homes in the agricultural portions of the Spanish provinces to the cities, and imprisoned upon the barren waste outside the residence portions of these cities and within the lines of intrenchment established a little way beyond.  Their humble homes were burned, their fields laid waste, their implements of husbandry destroyed, their live stock and food supplies for the most part confiscated.  Most of the people were old men, women, and children.  They were thus placed in hopeless imprisonment, without shelter or food.  There was no work for them in the cities to which they were driven.  They were left with nothing to depend upon except the scanty charity of the inhabitants of the cities and with slow starvation their inevitable fate....

The pictures in the American newspapers of the starving reconcentrados are true.  They can all be duplicated by the thousands.  I never before saw, and please God I may never again see, so deplorable a sight as the reconcentrados in the suburbs of Matanzas.  I can never forget to my dying day the hopeless anguish in their despairing eyes.  Huddled about their little bark huts, they raised no voice of appeal to us for alms as we went among them....

    Men, women, and children stand silent, famishing with hunger. 
    Their only appeal comes from their sad eyes, through which one
    looks as through an open window into their agonizing souls.