as well as pictures, furniture and all that fashion demands. Cubans are cosmopolitan and travel a great deal in the United States and Europe. For years past a brisk trade has been carried on with Europe, while under proper management all Cuba's wants might be supplied from our country. With the exception of sugar and tobacco, Cuba imports everything for her daily needs, clothing, food, household effects and furniture.

Although the majority of the lower classes are illiterate, yet they are intelligent and, generally speaking, peaceable. No semi-barbarous race exists in that island as in many of the West Indies.

Cubans imbibed the love of freedom in America, and financially and morally their struggle for independence was upheld by our country.

The moral obligation of America in relation to Cuba began as early as the beginning of the past century, and has continued with greater force since the United States freed Cuba from Spanish rule and adopted her as a ward of the nation. Jefferson, Adams, Jackson, Van Buren and other statesmen foresaw the day that Cuba's destinies would be linked with our own. "America for Americans and hands off," is the epitome of the Monroe doctrine, expounded for the enlightenment of Europe. It is not our province to enter into Cuban history, but we merely allude to Adam's message and the attitude of the United States during the Congress of Panama, in 1826.

The tariff concessions asked for at Washington by Cuban commissioners is a question which is attracting general attention, and President Roosevelt desires Congress to be just and kind to Cuba. This is a momentous crisis, which threatens financial ruin to the island, hard and grinding poverty to her inhabitants, and famine will stalk about unless averted by judicious and rightful measures immediately. Touch a man's pockets and you touch his heart, sounds cynical; but consider, if you undermine a man's livelihood, deprive him of his subsistence, tie his hands, you not only ruin him financially, but you ruin his home, and render his hearth desolate, and grinding poverty will not only destroy his strength but also break his spirit. This is the cause of Cuba's anguished cry and appeal for aid.

In answer to the oppositionists, who fear that concessions may destroy home industry and Cuban cane supersede American beet sugar, a bird's-eye glance at statistics will suffice to prove how groundless that fear is, and how unreasonable their opposition is to closer trade relations with the island. To put the case in a nutshell, so long as the Cuban production does not equal American consumption, it cannot imperil the sugar industry. During the past year the Cuban production was less than half of a fourth of American consumption, and the other supply came from other countries. Germany, the East and West Indies as well as Cuba sent sugar to the United States, and a small amount was supplied by Louisiana and the West. Does not this prove the fallacy of the assertion that the admission of Cuban sugar on better terms would destroy the sugar industry of the United States? This year our country will require 150,000 tons more, which amount cannot possibly be supplied at home or from her insular possessions. Cuban planters expect that Cuba will double her outputs in about four years, and this supposition is based upon the product of 1894, when the island was better equipped with labor, machinery, roads, railroads, shipping facilities and cattle than after the war, which devastated the land and laid in ashes fertile fields and leveled to the ground magnificent estates.

In fact, oppositionists in our country see with only one eye. Let them open both and scan the situation closely, and they will understand that Cuba's urgent demand for reduction of duties on sugar and tobacco will not take a penny from American industries, and will affect no industry, no interest, except the customs revenue of the United States, while, as an equivalent, all of Cuba's trade is offered, more than one hundred million dollars' worth this year. Cuba requires machinery, American foodstuffs, hardware, clothing and furniture, as well as all the necessities of life. Cuba offers millions of acres to American investors, and invites the labor and capital of her powerful neighbor to enrich her land and secure prosperity which will redound to the credit and renown of our great Republic.

America is the guardian of Cuba, and some statesmen consider annexation desirable, but not until after the Republic of Cuba is established. Then she might request to be included in the sisterhood of States. Then Cuba's star might be added to the American constellation. To be annexed under present conditions would be as a territory and to undergo a term of probation until fit for admission into the Union. Texas was a Republic and was admitted as a State.

Fair play is an Americanism; let us add Excelsior, onward, forward and upward.

Mary Elizabeth Springer.

New York.

V/

THE FALL OF ROOSEVELT.

The month of February—long remarkable and long to be remarkable as the birth month and death month of various distinguished characters—was especially remarkable this year for several evolutions and would-be blossomings of events and new characters that seemed aching for their bloom, but the weather was against premature and out-door flowering. It is the month of mating, of valentines and day dreams; the sparrows fighting and speedy nesting are all in season, but it is a little early for young birds, inexperienced Presidents, stumpfeathered republics, etc., etc.; so it has happened that our "strenuous" young President, who had greatness thrust upon him, has tumbled quickly to his true dimensions, and the old dominion of red-tape and confined versatility are going on undisturbed.

As heretofore noted, President Roosevelt was, and is, the first man of the new generation, that is, of the generation of Americans evolved since the "Civil War"—and the Spanish-American War was simply a dog fight in comparison with the real war of this nation—the first man of the new generation to occupy the presidential office, and having known of the young man from his boyhood, and his father before him, and having kept track of his many escapades on this planet, we were among those who sincerely hoped that he would bring into American politics something of the straightforward manliness inherited from his ancestors, and that he would, therefore, prove an exception to the coterie of weaklings who have been Presidents since Lincoln played his manly game and went down to history.

We confess openly that we were and are mistaken, disappointed. The "strenuous" young man has fallen from the ranks of the exceptional men of history and has already become one of the commonplace tools of the machine forces that dominate all the affairs of the American nation. Not only this, but we may rest assured that his crowning weakness is and will be typical of the very best men of his generation. Moral backbone and character went out of the nation with his forefathers. President Roosevelt began by announcing that he was and would be President of the whole American people. His first step was to invite a commonplace negro to the White House—an open insult to the more intelligent body of the American people, an act for which he is still eating humble pie.

In The Globe notes of No. 43, September, 1901, I made the following comment upon this man as compared with McKinley:

"President Roosevelt is a man of sterner stuff. Of well-bred Presbyterian ancestry, he comes from the well-to-do social circles, and for that very reason, unless his ancestry and education amount to nothing, he may be looked to as a man who will favor justice between the rich and the poor. Moreover, his own career, so far—though too much noise has been made about it— is neither ordinary nor despicable. I ridiculed his conduct in connection with the crazy reforms attempted in New York a few years ago, but it is a credit to his good sense that he dropped that folly very soon after he discovered the true inwardness of the business. I have little or no respect for his work in the American war with Spain. I hate the whole business, and despise every man engaged therein. I do not admire his insatiate fancy for rough sportsmanship. He was not long enough Governor of New York to prove the real greatness that I have always believed to be in him, but all these rapid and fuming changes, from the comparative privacy of life to the Presidency of the United States, indicate him as being in some sense a man of destiny, and not of the common herd of mechanics, salesmen, clerks, pettifoggers and politicians.

"In the general notions of military destiny and conquest, of expansion and of empire, Roosevelt is with the party in power; is, in fact, far more typical of all that than McKinley ever was, and I predict for him in that regard a splendid career.

"In all probability, he will very soon change the Cabinet and appoint men more in accord with his own personal way of doing things. The Hanna tyranny will cease. President Roosevelt will be master in his own house. The events of the last few years will have sobered as well as matured his reason, and as he is a much smarter man than any one of the old gang, he will get smarter men about him."

This has proven partly true and partly false prophecy. I had over-estimated the man. He ousted Smith, of the Philadelphia Press from the post-office, and is said to have restored Quay to power. He ousted Gage from the Treasury and secured a more capable political tool for his own purposes. But at this writing, March third, the old machine is in power, and the accidental President has become a sort of fifth wheel in that great machine. Let us follow his fall with some approach to order.

His next important step was to announce that the Government was satisfied as to who was its international friend during the infamous war with Spain, and hence Great Britain was accounted the special friend of the United States, etc., etc. This the Irish and the German elements naturally resented; and while these pages are being written, Prince Henry of Germany is the honored guest of the American people, while the President himself is toting hither and thither at the heels of a mere princeling, and the newspapers of both hemispheres are amusing themselves over the amusing discussion as to who, after all, was the real friend of the United States during its always to be remembered dastardly war with Spain; and the President's decision is ignored. In a word, the President has not maintained either of the positions taken in the cases indicated. He has been caught in the fog of popular rascality and has become one of the boys.

In number 44 of The Globe, December, 1901, I again spoke of the President as follows:

"There seems to have been a special Providence in the act of President Roosevelt in inviting the one-fifth negro Booker Washington to dine wiih him and his family at the White House. It has been a God-send to the stupid newspapers. They had worn themselves out in abuse of their respective opponents in the fall campaign, and this incident of a black man in the White House gave them a new subject for discussion.

"It diverted the mind of the nation from the exaggerations of its sorrow to a new humbuggery of the old negro question, which has come up in various ways once and again during the