his newspaper opposition was not slow in taking advantage, even to the limits of the grotesque. It was said of him once that tho he cannot part lus name in the middle, yet he has an unsullied reputation, pays his debts, and is welcome in the best society in the South.' The fact is, however, that his name was once parted in the middle; for he has abbreviated it from the less euphonious Michael Hoke Smith to its present state. As for, reputations, there are none left in Georgia, among the candidates who went to the primaries, and it will be long before the remnants can be assembled.

"Certainly Hoke Smith was no hayseed, in spite of the efforts of the press humorists to so convert him. Before the North heard much of him he was the most successful lawyer in Georgia, owned a prosperous newspaper, and had established himself warmly in the hearts of many Georgians by his stand 'agin' the railroads."

He is, we are further told, a powerful speaker and a hard worker, and with the recent bitter controversies in his party he has had nothing to do.

A

SMILE curled the lips of Cuba's President as he read aloud to some office-holders in Havana the bulletin announcing that the famous negro leader, General Quentin Bandera, had placed himself at the head of a little force of insurgents and had sworn to overturn the whole Havana Government. In another twenty-four hours President Palma was making light of a second bulletin. Insurgents had attacked and carried the town of San Luis ip Pinar del Rio, their leader being that adroit guerrilla fighter and former member of the Guban Congress; Señor Pino Guerra. "There is positively no cause for alarm," declared

President Palma to some timid representatives of that new railway which, by connecting Havana and Santiago, opened to exploitation one year ago forests and fields as virgin as Columbus found them. The capitalists had not yet quitted President Palma's library when other despatches announced that General Jose Miguel Gomez, accompanied by a band of suspicious characters, was marching upon a provincial town. "Gomez in arms!" exclaimed President Palma, and his face lost, for the first time, say those who saw Cuba's ruler then, the unconcerned expression he had worn for days: He summoned General Freyre Andrade at once. When things in Cuba must be done thoroly and with speed, the President of the island calls for Andrade-never in vain. Andrade can carry an election, put down a band of insurgents, preside over a turbulent debate in the House at Havana, unwind intricate technicalities of administration and give sound advice when a revolution begins to look serious. His mere participation in President Palma's councils revealed to all Havana that a crisis had come.

WITHIN twenty-four hours General Jose

Miguel Gomez was traced to his ranch in Santa Clara province and placed under arrest. He was hurried to Havana and put in a jail. A first encounter with insurgents in Santa Clara had led to their rout and the killing of a mulo. Gomez denied that he had conspired to disturb Cuba's peace or against the Palma administration. Had it been otherwise, his pride would have sufficed, he added, to make him admit everything. Certainly the sympathy of Cuba

CRYING FOR ANNEXATION DAME CUBA: "I think, uncle, he's crying to come to you." -Dart in The Minneapolis Journal.

is above the level of mere guerrila warfare. He can plan a campaign, handle infantry and train a battery of light artillery to enfilade an advancing column. President Palma can rely on no such versatility in his service-even Andrade has limitations. Gomez was accordingly led to the lock-up less for his guilt than his brilliance. The ungraciousness of such measures against the greatest living hero of the war against Spain, in the face of his denial that he is implicated in the rebellion, caused popular demonstrations in his favor. Instead of quelling the revolt the arrest caused greater excitement; and the first thing an excited man ip Cuba thinks of is insurrection. This Gomez is not, of course, the illustrious "liberator of Cuba," Maximo Gomez, who died last year. The two were not even related.

WHIL HILE Gomez familiarized himself with the practical workings of penological institutions in the Cuban capital, that sexagenarian hero of all the blacks in the island, General Quentin Bandera, himself almost a full-blooded negro, was marching at the head of a thousand insurgents about twenty miles from Havana. The name of Bandera is beloved in every province, for the general was the Nestor of the ten years' war for independence. His republicanism was eloquent when it dealt with the theme of his own exclusion from office on the day he broke into the Senate, defied the sergeant-at-arms and insisted that he be made chief of police. He was appointed a parliamentary doorkeeper. Last month he was the first to take up arms. In an encounter near Havana he overcame the raw youths forming the backbone of the rural guards and won a base that gave him control of the railway. In twenty-four hours he had been surrounded by Andrade's picked men sent from Havana in a hurry. Bandera, with two followers, was ambushed. He fought until his body seemed riddled with bullets, wielding his machete until the foe had cut him to pieces. Thus perished the commander who, with the late General Calixto Garcia, shared the honors won in the province of Santiago during the years of rebellion against Spain in the late nineties. Bandera had the reputation of being fearless under fire and of being a master of infantry tactics in skirmish fights. He was considered by the "liberator of Cuba," General Maximo Gomez, as second to none of his lieutenants. When, six years ago, Bandera paid his triumphal visit to Havana, he was met at the station by thousands of his race who took the horses from his carriage and led him through the streets for hours. Bandera's death seemed for a time to have broken the back of insurrection in the whole island.

ALL eyes were now turned toward the prov

ince of Pinar del Rio, where some five thousand insurgents had quite unaccountably equipped themselves for a campaign with wellmounted cavalry, a regimental organization for infantry and, according to one despatch, a machine-gun as a nucleus of artillery. In command of these troops, said to be not mere hasty levies but, to a great extent, trained veterans of Cuba's wars, was the noted ex-member of Congress, Señor Fustino or Pino Guerra. Guerra fought under General Maximo Gomez, winning the admiration of the liberator, it seems, by his strategy. On the field, Guerra,

apparently, does not distinguish himself, but in planning a campaign he is inferior to no living Cuban except General Jose Miguel Gomez himself. Guerra scored the first important success of the present rebellion by his capture of the town of San Luis. He had thus, after a pitched battle in which the killed and wounded were on the side of the enemy, secured as a base a well-provisioned town of some 10,000 inhabitants not ten miles from the town of Pinar del Rio, capital of the great province of that name. Guerra at once occupied the neighboring towns, meeting with little opposition and allowing the local officials to administer the municipal governments. He announced his intention of reinforcing his levies from volunteers in the province, after which he would capture Pinar del Rio itself. His policy is to force the Havana Government to annul the last presidential election and hold a fresh one.

WASHINGTON had observed the out

break of this insurrection with indifference, but it observed the rapidity of Guerra's progress with amazement. The Platt amendment to Cuba's constitution, providing that the United States shall have the right of intervention for the preservation of the island's independence and for the maintenance of an or

derly government, therein, became an urgent topic. Rumors that Palma's government had asked Washington, for field batteries and men to put down the rising turned out the merest fabrication. But newspapers all over the land were kindled to intensity of comment by the reflected fervor of the Cuban spirit in arms. The Palma administration had no "status in the form of equity." "Its right to govern is purely technical and is vitiated by wholesale fraud." Such points, made by "not a few impartial onlookers," commended themselves to the New York Sun and to many of its contemporaries. On the other hand it is affirmed that Palma is just the kind of President the Cubans need-"sound, sensible, unpretentious, untroubled by inordinate ambition and devoted to the maintenance of a government that will assure to the Cuban people an opportunity for the peaceful development of the resources of their island." Thus the New York Times championed the President at Havana stoutly and did not stand alone. Nebulous hypotheses of a five-million-dollar fund created by sugar planters in support of an insurrection that must entail annexation befogged much editorial comment and clarified nothing. At first Mr. Roosevelt on the whole subject of Cuba could have given lessons to the Sphinx in reticence.

Copyright, 1906, by Underwood & Underwood, N Y