The text of President Grant's Message to Congress upon the
relations of the United States to Cuba has reached this country. Its principal point, that an insurrection is only to be recognized by a neutral power when the insurgents have an organized government, means of maintaining war and raising revenue, a capital city, and prize courts, was correctly reported by cable, and amounts to a full justification of the conduct of England and France in conceding belligerent rights to the South. There are, how- ever, some side points ; the most important being the savage man- ner in which the war is carried on, the, Spaniards shooting twenty prisoners a day, while the Cuban Quesada acknow- ledges the slaughter in one day and in cold blood of 650 prisoners ; and the contempt which the stern President pours upon the Cubans within the Union. It is not often that a sentence like this finds a place in an official document :—" During the whole contest, the remarkable exhibition has been made of large numbers of Cubans escaping from the island, and avoiding tha risks of war, congregating in this country, at a safe distance from the scene of danger, and endeavouring to make war from our own shores, to urge our people into the fight which they avoid, and to embroil this Government in complications and possible hostilities with Spain."
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