The government of Spain has not appropriated and will not appropriate one dollar to save these people.  They are now being attended and nursed and administered to by the charity of the United States.  Think of the spectacle!  We are feeding these citizens of Spain; we are nursing their sick; we are saving such as can be saved, and yet there are those who still say it is right for us to send food, but we must keep hands off.  I say that the time has come when muskets ought to go with the food.

We asked the governor if he knew of any relief for these people except through the charity of the United States.  He did not.  We asked him, “When do you think the time will come that these people can be placed in a position of self-support?” He replied to us, with deep feeling, “Only the good God or the great government of the United States will answer that question.”  I hope and believe that the good God by the great government of the United States will answer that question.

I shall refer to these horrible things no further.  They are there.  God pity me, I have seen them; they will remain in my mind forever—­and this is almost the twentieth century.  Christ died nineteen hundred years ago, and Spain is a Christian nation.  She has set up more crosses in more lands, beneath more skies, and under them has butchered more people than all the other nations of the earth combined.  Europe may tolerate her existence as long as the people of the Old World wish.  God grant that before another Christmas morning the last vestige of Spanish tyranny and oppression will have vanished from the Western Hemisphere!...

The time for action has come.  No greater reason for it can exist to-morrow than exists to-day.  Every hour’s delay only adds another chapter to the awful story of misery and death.  Only one power can intervene—­the United States of America.  Ours is the one great nation in the world, the mother of American republics.  She holds a position of trust and responsibility toward the peoples and affairs of the whole Western Hemisphere.  It was her glorious example which inspired the patriots of Cuba to raise the flag of liberty in her eternal hills.  We cannot refuse to accept this responsibility which the God of the universe has placed upon us as the one great power in the New World.  We must act!  What shall our action be?

Against the intervention of the United States in this holy cause there is but one voice of dissent; that voice is the voice of the money-changers.  They fear war!  Not because of any Christian or ennobling sentiment against war and in favor of peace, but because they fear that a declaration of war, or the intervention which might result in war, would have a depressing effect upon the stock market.  Let them go.  They do not represent American sentiment; they do not represent American patriotism.  Let them take their chances as they can.  Their weal or woe is of but little