Concas Palan claims for his chief and the comrades who fell in this futile and disastrous affair “a right to the legitimate defence which our country expects from us, though it is against the interested silence which those who were the cause of our misfortunes would fain impose on us,” and says that “some day, and that probably much sooner than seems probable at present,” the judgment of Spain on this episode will be that of the English Review, which he quotes as the heading of his chapter.  He goes on:  “War was accepted by Spain when the island of Cuba was already lost to her, and when the dispatch of a single soldier more from the Peninsula was infinitely more likely to have caused an insurrection than that of which our Ministers were afraid—­at the moment, also, when our troops were in want of the merest necessaries, the arrears of pay being the chief cause of their debilitated condition, and when a great part of the Spanish residents in Cuba, under the name of ‘Reformers,’ ‘Autonomists,’ etc., had made common cause with the insurgents, while they were enriching themselves to a fabulous extent by contracts for supplies and transports.  In these circumstances it was folly to accept a struggle with an immensely rich country, possessing a population four times that of ours, and but a pistol shot from the seat of action.”  The Government of Spain was perfectly aware that the troops in Cuba were already quite insufficient even to cope with the insurgents, that the people at home were already murmuring bitterly at the cost of the war, and that it was impossible to send out a contingent of any practical value.  Sickness of all kinds, enteric, anaemia, and all the evils of under-fed and badly found troops, were rapidly consuming the forces in Cuba, “and yet the Government took no thought of who was to man the guns whose gunners were drifting daily into the hospital and the cemetery....  The national debt was increasing in a fabulous manner, and recourse was had to the mediaeval remedy of debasing the currency, while even at that moment the troops had more than a year’s pay in arrear, and absolute penury was augmenting their other sufferings.”

    [1] La Escuadra del Almirante Cervera, por Victor M.
    Concas Palan.

This was the moment which the responsible Ministers of the Crown thought propitious to throw down the gauntlet to the overwhelming power of America rather than to face what the writer terms the “cabbage-headed riff-raff of the Plaza de la Cevada” of Madrid.  Again and again was the absolute inefficiency of the fleet pointed out to them.  Even the few ships there were, all of them vastly inferior to those of the United States’ navy, were without their proper armament; they might have been of some service in defence of the coast of Spain, but in aggressive warfare they were useless.  Allowing somewhat for the natural indignation of one of those who was sacrificed, who saw his beloved commander and his comrades-in-arms