The daily morning journal and courier., 1898-02-21

rywhere in the land. The desperate case demanded heroic measures, said the Marquis of Teneriffe; so the Span- ish soldiers secured the country, driv- ing people from their homes, burning the houses over their heads and killing all who resisted. The eviction of "Evangeline's people from Nova Sco- tia was as nothing in comparison, for the Norman peasants were compara- lively wealthy and were allowed to take their movable property with
 them. Fancy being simply turned out
 of your own homes in New Haven with
 only what you could hastily collect
 and carry in your hands, the rest be-
 ing burned before your eyes. But that
 would not be parallel case, because
 all of you have some means in reserve,
 the large towns are near together and
 food is plenty in the United States.
 Most of these poor Cubans, poverty
 stricken in the best of times, had only
 their palm cottages and
 small patches of ground where few
 yams and vegetables were raised.
 There are practically no farms in Cuba
 such as we know them in Gods coup-
 try" Rich and poor are alike sus- tained by the products of two great crops. sugar and tobacco, and when those are cut off season after season,
 as since this war began, nothing is left. Even when poor man rents thirty-three acres of land, (the usual 1 measure of the country), he devotes
 but a small part of it to the raising | of pigs, chickens andvegetables for his own use. The majority of the peas- ants have been employed as day labor CTS upon the large plantations at very
 small wages-until the insurgents | burnt the cane-flelds, the Spanish sol- diers ate the cattle, the government | claimed the tobacco, and between the
 two armies the richest were in hard
 straits indeed For the peasantry there was suffering enough heaven
 knows, but they had still their homes
 and could pick up some sort of sub sistence in the familiar places. In
 many of the huts were aged and sick people and babies newly born. But I Weyler's orders were positive-out they must go on the instant, and the
 habitations burned to the ground, The
 recital of one case, no harder than
 thousands of others, will do for an ex- l ample. A man past middle age had spent a quarter of century saving,
 penny by penny, from his scanty
 wages to buy a bit of land and build a 1 comfortable cottage upon it. When it I was finally paid for his pride and joy l was unbounded. His wife and children
 and aged mother had home for life, \ so he fondly believed, and the women | titled the little field while he worked on an adjacent estate. But alas! I Their joy was not of long duration.
 Within one month after the family was established a company of soldiers or dered them to leave. How could the 1 poor man give up the hope of a life l time through no fault of his own? Half crazed with grief, he resisted the l fellow who fired the house, was shot
 and his yet quivering body tossed upon l the blazing roof. It was weary
 leagues to Havana. The aged mother died on the second days march, one by one the children sickened and died
 on the way, and only the wife lived to
 reach the fortified city. saw her in
 Havana, sitting on the ground near the
 barracks, the very picture of despair. Our first visit this morning was to Los Fosos, an abandoned warehouse
 near the waters edge and Moro Castle, which Is now used as hospital for
 several hundred sick reconcentrados.
 After the reign of terror began and the
 wretches were dying by hundreds in
 the streets-no provision whatever having been made for their mainte-
 nance by the Spanish government
 some charitable Cubans in Havana made bold to establish hospitals and take care of them as best they could.
 1Con+;,,,,ed on seven1l Do