File:America's war for humanity, related in story and picture, embracing a complete history of Cuba's struggle for liberty... (1898) (14762090984).jpg

Identifier: americaswarforhu00inga (find matches)
Title: America's war for humanity, related in story and picture, embracing a complete history of Cuba's struggle for liberty...
Year: 1898 (1890s)
Authors: Ingalls, John James, 1833-1900
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Publisher: New York, Thompson
Contributing Library: Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center
Digitizing Sponsor: Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center

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enough to foil the vigilance of a dozen sentries was defiled by the instinct of these cursed four-footers; and ten or twelve mastiffs on picket guard around a stockade were generally so well trained that half a dozen of their champion racers took up the trail of a runaway, while the rest attended to the functions of a home guard reserve. Fugitives from inhuman overwork were either burned alive or flayed with manatee knouts, and not one in a hundred could hope to run a mile before the hounds had him up a tree. HORRORS OF THE SPANISH OCCUPATION OF CUBA. 67 Suicide, in fact, remained the only refuge from the dismal alternative of cremation or death from overwork; and history presents only few examples of similar epidemics of despair overcoming the terrors of annihilation. In the course of the Roman conquest of Spain, two cities were besieged till the inhabitants committed suicide en masse; and, under the reign of the Ptolemies,a combination of hard times and sickening siroccos impelled some 15,000
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descendants of original, Indian stock. peasants to seek the peace of eternal sleep in the bed of the Nile. But the number of suicides among the natives on the three islands of Cuba, San Domingo and Puerto Rico has been estimated at a yearly average of 100,000—a full third of the number of those who succumbed to excess of toil. There were exceptions, no doubt: men like Las Casas, who urged the colonists—not to renounce slavery, for he might as well have asked them to 68 AMERICAS WAR FOR HUMANITY. liberate their horses and mules, but to import human beasts of burden with less fragile backbones and a less pronounced penchant for a method of self-help that no vigilance could prevent. There were also humanitarians like Governor Valdez and a few planters, who would sooner work their lands at amere living profit than get rich by starving their slaves; but the horrid fact remains that in the fifty years from 1510 to 1560 the population of the West Indian archipelago was reduced eighty-five per

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