The present revolution is but the successor of other similar insurrections which have occurred in Cuba against the dominion of Spain, extending over a period of nearly half a century, each of which during its progress has subjected the United States to great effort and expense in enforcing its neutrality laws, caused enormous losses to American trade and commerce, caused irritation, annoyance and disturbance among our citizens, and by the exercise of cruel, barbarous and uncivilized practices of warfare, shocked the sensibilities and offended the humane sympathies of our people.

Since the present revolution began, in February, 1895, this country has seen the fertile domain at our threshold ravaged by fire and sword in the course of a struggle unequaled in the history of the island, and rarely paralleled as to the number of the combatants and the bitterness of the contest by any revolution of modern times, where a dependent people striving to be free have been oppressed by the power of the sovereign State.  Our people have beheld a once prosperous community reduced to comparative want, its lucrative commerce virtually paralyzed, its exceptional productiveness diminished, its fields laid waste, its mills in ruins, and its people perishing by tens of thousands from hunger and destitution.  We have found ourselves constrained in the observance of that strict neutrality which our laws enjoin, and which the law of nations commands, to police our waters and watch our own seaports in prevention of any unlawful act in aid of the Cubans.

Loss of American trade.

Our trade has suffered, the capital invested by our citizens in Cuba has been largely lost, and the temper and forbearance of our people have been so seriously tried as to beget a perilous unrest among our own citizens, which has inevitably found its expression from time to time in the National Legislature, so that issues wholly external to our own body politic stand in the way of that close devotion to domestic advancement that becomes’s self-contained commonwealth, whose primal maxim has been the avoidance of all foreign entanglements.  All this must needs awaken, and has indeed aroused, the utmost concern on the part of this government, as well during my predecessor’s term as in my own.

In April, 1896, the evils from which our country suffered through the Cuban war became so onerous that my predecessor made an effort to bring about a peace through the mediation of this government in any way that might tend to an honorable adjustment of the contest between Spain and her revolted colony, on the basis of some effective scheme of self-government for Cuba under the flag and sovereignty of Spain.  It failed, through the refusal of the Spanish Government then in power to consider any form of mediation, or, indeed, any plan of settlement which did not begin with the actual submission of the insurgents to the mother country, and then only on such terms as Spain herself might see fit to grant.  The war continued unabated.  The resistance of the insurgents was in no wise diminished.