Spain’s intellectual dry rot.

Spain, suffering, as it suffers to-day, from intellectual dry rot, had known for weeks of the intended beleaguerment.  Then, as now, nothing adequate was done to meet it.  The Governor of Havana, the Marquis de Gonzalez, was a gallant soldier, as he was to prove; but that ounce of prevention which is proverbially worth more than the pound of cure, was not taken by him, and the British found the fortifications in a partially ruinous condition, and the fourteen ships of the line which were lying in the harbor before the city in such a state that they could hardly be called in commission.  The Spanish army of defense numbered 27,000 men, and was in better condition; but the Spanish sailors were utterly demoralized by the granting of too much shore liberty, and the best use the Spaniard could put his fighting ships to was by sinking them at the entrance to the anchorage to prevent the entrance of the British fleet.  Once the enemy was before the city, however, all was activity.  The fortifications, which were too newly erected to be quite incapable of repair, were set in order, the guns of Morro Castle and of the fort known as the Puntal, across from it, were trained on the advancing foe, and the Spanish ships were sunk, as has been said.

Those familiar with the history of English administrative methods during this period will find little to choose between them and the methods of Spain.  The season of the year most unwholesome to the inhabitants of a temperate climate had already set in, with all its train of pestilences, when the British arrived.  Though deluged by the tremendous rains of the tropics from day to day, the water supply was wholly insufficient, and the little obtainable was so tainted as to make its use fraught with danger.  There was no pilot who knew the roadstead in order to lead the ships against the Morro and the Puntal for many days.  In throwing up the parallels and approaches to the walls of the city on the landward side, the soldiers found such scarcity of earth, the blanket over the rocks being of the thinnest sort, that this necessary material for covering an attack had to be brought from a distance.  Then, too, it was charged with the germs of disease, and all who handled it suffered extremely.  Despite all the precautions of the officers, the sanitary condition surrounding the camp was horrible, and the troops died like dogs.

Yankees in Cuba.

Meanwhile there was a large force of British regulars in North America, stationed there ever since the fall of the French empire in the new world in 1760.  Four thousand of these soldiers were gathered in New York City.  To them the colonies of East and West Jersey added a regiment of 500 men, New York another of 800, while Lyman raised a full thousand in Connecticut.  When these, too, had been assembled in New York, Lyman was made Brigadier General of the colonial troops,