The Topeka state journal. [volume] (Topeka, Kansas) 1892-1980, 1898-05-25
SCORCHING WORDS.
A Former Free State Man Writes of
the Spanish Character.

Thaddeus Hyatt. the man who was
one, If not the most. prominent figure In
| the Free State history of Kansas, and
| 10 whom attention was called a short
time ago by a pathetic letter written
| Secretary Adams of the state historical
| society, has enclosed Judge Adams a
| copy OF letter recently sent to an
English lord who is an intimate friend
OF the surviving contemporary of Gree
! ley and Seward. The letter was writ
! ten in reply to one sympathizing with
! Spain in the present trouble, and is in
terest1ng as coming from Hyatt. 1t
| reads as follows:
My Dear Arthur:-I am both anger
ed and amazed by the sympathy for
Spain expressed in your letter. That
all governments are beasts I know
as well as yOu-the Scripture says So
but most Of them have redeeming quail
tiles of some sort; your love has none,
not one. Preeminent for brutishness
among her brute confreres, natures
supremest effort to produce a monster
stands revealed in Thermometer of
monsters, sui genesis unique. A me-
the stealthy catamount and sneaking
hyena, an existence upon our planet
which marks an epoch of creations
forces in devil evolution. To know this
reptile is to hate it; to speak it is to
damn.
You are an Englishman, with the
chiValrouS English impulse for fair
play and 1.-The under dog but think
your SympathieS would be with the up
per dog when the under one was a rat
tlesnake. An adversary whose best
work is done in the dark, or behind
mask by spies, poison and the dagger
has no claim upon the sympathies of
creatures other than those he most re-
SembleS.
The fruits of spafn's centuries of con-
quest are visible today in nations and
peoples once mild, innocent and inof-
fensive, now degraded into brutes inoc-
ulated with all the vices and SaVagery
n al Loft cd
Spain is the malefactor of nations.
The tramp of her feet over continents
may be traced as we follow the course
of a cyclone by the desolate ruins it
leaves in it's track. Four hundred
years of rapine, cruelty and grinding
oppression of her conquered victims
have incorporated into the worlds his
tory 400 pages of wickedness unparal-
leled by any records outside the portals
which swing the black hinges of hell.
No true man properly Informed can
champion the cause of a nation whose
entire history is a record of unspeaka-
BILE shame redeemed and Hghtened at
no point by one single trait of a decent
humanity, whose only courage is that
of the wild beast and the savage, whose
only intelligence is reptile, and whose
highest idea of man, government and
a ruler is that concentrated essence of
all deViltry, that Phillip of SPAIN
whose Machiavelian miracle mongering
was so profound that the mere raising
of his finger in the dark seclusion of his
own palace could circumvent the death
of the meanest peasant or the most
powerful of pOtentateS the round world |
over.
Arthur, my boy, you are not well up !
in the criminal calendar of nations; |
your upper story is not thoroughly |
furnished with literature applicable to |
the case in hand. Don't slop your SYM |
pathies over unworthy objects; don't |
experiment on SkunkS with otto Of |
roses. The otto of hell is the cure for |
its smell, ''simila similibus curantur." |
remain your affectionate kinsman, !
THADDEUS HYATT.