With the destruction of her Armada
her warlike ascendancy passed and she had nothing to put in its place.
She had not tillers of the soil, mechanics or skilled merchants.
Business was taking the place of war all over the world, but Spain
knew only religion and war, hence worsted in her only field, she was
doomed.
From the days of Philip II her decline was rapid. Her territory
slipped from her as rapidly as it had been acquired. Her great domains
on our soil are now the seat of thriving communities of
English-speaking people. The whole continent of South America has
thrown off her yoke, though still retaining her language, and our
troops now embarked from Port Tampa are destined to wrest from her the
two only remaining colonies subject to her sway in the Western
World,--Cuba and Porto Rico. With all her losses hitherto, Spain has
not learned wisdom. Antagonistic to truth and liberty, she seems to
sit in the shadow of death, hugging the delusions that have betrayed
her, while all other people of earth are pressing onward toward light
and liberty.
The struggle in Cuba had been going on for years, and in that colony
of less than two millions of inhabitants, many of whom were Spaniards,
there was now an army four times as large as the standing army of the
United States.
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