Part 9

The Cuban government is immature. To say that most of it exists on paper is not sinistrous to an ambitious civil organization which has been in existence but two years. Schemed exactly like that of the States, the unfavorable condition under which it labors makes many of its functions of mere nominal existence. For instance, the Secretary of State just at this time has no duty to perform other than, perhaps, to doff his figurative robes of state and get out and fight. The Secretary of War has no routine office, because the Cubans have no diplomatic corps and the rebellion is conducted by aggressive generals who have the munitions of war in their own hands.

Yet the Cuban insurgents have established a civil organization in the interior over which they hold sway, the strength and qualities of endurance and prominence of which defy the government of Spain itself. The remoteness of the Cuban headquarters, and the control which Spain has had over the regular news channels that lead from Cuba, have kept the world largely in ignorance of the real condition of the Cuban insurgents.

Fundamentally and upon which the plans of the government are drawn, the Republic of Cuba now comprehends all the area of the island of Cuba. The disposition taken by the head civil officers is that the entire island is under dominion of the Cuban Republic, but that because some powerful foreign enemy has landed on certain parts and taken possession--as, for instance, Havana and its harbor, and Santiago and other cities--the civil rule cannot be extended into these quarters until by strategy the enemy can be driven from the shores of Cuba. In the national organization the power of government was transferred by the popular assembly to a Council of Government. Then departments were formed, with secretaries at the head--state, war, foreign affairs, interior, and finances. At the head of the government were placed a provisional President and Vice-President. In the Council of Government is vested the legislative power.

Politically the island is divided into four States, Oriente, Camaguey, Las Villas, and Occidente. Each State is divided into districts, and each district into as many prefecturas and sub-prefecturas as are deemed necessary. A district has from seven to fifteen prefecturas. The State is presided over by a Governor, who reports to the Secretary of Interior. The Lieutenant-Governor is under the Governor, and has jurisdiction over a district. His corps consists of one secretary and one assistant clerk. The prefectura is the smallest political subdivision but one--the sub-prefectura. The prefectura has a secretary and assistants. Then follow the sub-prefecturas, of which there are generally from four to eight in each prefectura.

The Lieutenant-Governor is the intermediary between the Governor and the prefectura. Besides his executive functions the prefecto has judicial power. He records all contracts between citizens, including marriages. He has the power to form a jury and to try all cases, from the simplest intrigues to those of spies guilty of treason, whenever the cases cannot be submitted to court-martial.

Every portion of territory possessed by the Cubans is subject to civil order. The minutest detail is so accurately and delicately balanced that, though the thoroughness for which the civil officers are even now adroitly working has not yet been attained, the whole governmental machinery is in harmonic operation.

The facts which I have set down relative to the geographic distribution of the government I have myself seen. I spent much time in the saddle on the march with Carlos Manuel de Cespedes, who, as Governor of Oriente, conducts the affairs of state in the saddle. With him I visited the prefectural workshops and many well-managed prefecturas. I saw much rearranging and readjusting of these functions by the Governor.

Almost the first thing the Governor said to me at our first meeting at Baire Arriba, was: "I have been wishing for months that I could get hold of an American newspaper man to show him the inside of the revolution. The American people don't know how strong we are. They have no way of finding out. Now I will show you our civil government as it is in operation." We visited the medical posts--"drug-stores" as the Cubans call them--the tanneries, workshops, and the various officials, including the tax-collector.

Supplementary to the regular lines of civic routine are other branches of organization necessitated by the war. The most important of these is that of the tax-collector. The State tax-collector has as many subordinate officers as the Governor. Taxes are levied on those engaged in commercial pursuits. This commerce is, of course, only internal. The levying of taxes and the subsequent shipment of Spanish money to the United States for use by the Junta has created great scarcity of money among the insurgents. The schedule in effect when I was with chief tax-collector Tomas Pedro Grinan, in February, was as follows:

Coffee and cocoa 4 pesos per 100 pounds. Timber 8 " " 1000 feet. Hemp 4 " " 100 pounds. Wax 4 " " 100 pounds. Honey 1 peso per 100 pounds. Cattle 3 pesos per head. Cheese 2 " " 100 pounds. Bananas .03 peso per bunch. Tobacco (leaf) 5 pesos per 100 pounds.

The commerce consists of the exchange of the products of one part of the island with those of another. I once saw Cespedes stop a coffee merchant, and, upon his inability to produce a receipt for the tax on the coffee he was transporting, take into custody him and twelve little pack-mules. The man pleaded that there was no tax-collector in the vicinity when he started on his journey, paid his fine, which I think was thirty pesos, and continued his march with a receipt for taxes.

Four important branches of the government of the Republic of Cuba are the territorial guard, the coast inspection, the postal service, and the workshop system. Each prefectura has under its supervision ten armed territorial guards, who serve also as police. These guards scout the Spanish columns when they venture from their blockhouses.

Every district with a seacoast has a civil coast inspector, who ranks as a captain in the army. He is assisted by a sub-inspector, who acts as his secretary. The inspectors have established along the coast line and in every bay and inlet watch posts, commanded each by a vigilant, who has under him eight or ten coast-guards. In this way, when a Spanish man-of-war sets out from a port, the news is signalled along the coast, and the Cubans, if she be in sight of the land, watch every movement of the ship. The coast-guards have captured many small Spanish sailing vessels.

Saltmaking is carried on under the direction of an inspector. All the salt consumed by the Cubans is made from distilled sea water. A hundred men are continually boiling sea water in Santiago de Cuba province. These saltmakers are ready at all times to take up arms.

The postal system is under the direct care of the Governor of each State. Along the rough roads at intervals of ten or fifteen miles are established the Cuban postmasters, each supplied with from four to eight couriers. In this way official as well as private communications are carried to any part of the island. Each post office is supplied with a registering stamp, so that the time of the coming or going of every parcel is registered upon it. There is a dead-letter office, and the lists are published monthly at the presses of _El Cubano Libre_.

The workshops are under charge of foremen. These shops turn out all kinds of roughly made but substantial leather goods, such as shoes, boots, bags, saddles, straps, and belts. Gun shops, powder factories, and cartridge factories are said to exist on the island, but I never saw them. The making of other metal articles, such as cooking utensils, is in its infancy.

The Cubans are struggling hard to form some sort of a school system. The "little press in the woods" was just printing a little primer, written on the fields, to be distributed among families for the tutoring of children when I left the printing establishment last January.

The medical posts and stations are under military order, and are purely provisional. The post of El Mate, in Jiguani, I found in charge of Dr. Farrel, a graduate of a medical institute in Spain, and Dr. Rafael de Lorie of New York. This post is tolerably well stocked. It contains about one hundred pounds of antiseptic plasters, tablets and gauzes, 10,000 quinine pills and powders, thirty pounds of drugs, ten pounds of narcotics, and fifty quarts of tonics.

Like the whole military system of the Cubans, this post has an objectionable management, subject only to the orders of a few officials, so that it does little practical good, and many persons are dying for want of proper medical attention.

I have told in this article what I have seen during four months of constant travel among the insurgents.

When it is remembered that the Cubans have spread the rebellion over more than two-thirds of the area of the island, and have carried into effect, for their purposes, a provisional form of government successfully in the time of war, it is reasonable to suppose that they are capable of rearranging their government and maintaining it in time of peace.

A NOTED AMERICAN PREACHER.

BY DUNCAN McDERMID, M. A.

It is interesting, while it is said that preaching is losing its ancient power, to find here and there a preacher whose influence is increasing instead of diminishing. One of these is the Rev. Minot J. Savage, D. D., of the Unitarian Church.

The writer desires to call attention to the two essential conditions of this preacher's influence and popularity. This will be instructive not only to the public, but to the clerical profession as well. One of these conditions may be found in the wide latitude of American opinion, especially as it expresses itself in New England, and particularly in the city of Boston where Mr. Savage spent many years as a preacher.

I.

In the community in which one lives, no less than in himself, often lies the secret of a man's strength and greatness. The individual shares the endowment or potency of those impersonal forces which sustain and enhance public life. The spirit which animates the broader ranges of general history acts with unhindered freedom on the narrower sphere of the individual mind and often becomes the creator of its better moments. Silent influences, hidden providences, are at work in society of which the individual has no suspicion, and whose effects cannot be recorded in statistics. Below the plane of conscious recognition there are far-reaching movements of thought which transcend our powers of understanding, but which act with almost unbounded sway in controlling the thought and life of each person. The early promise is fulfilled in the ripening powers of the mind under the cumulative influences which nourish it from without. In the order which surrounds the individual, and in the movement of which he has become a part, we see, as clearly as in himself, the inevitable promise of his ultimate destiny.

In whatever pertains to liberal culture Boston is never weak or wavering. Boston impresses one as possessing innate respect and enthusiasm for intellectual supremacy, and reverence for the pure sentiments of religion as continuous forces in human life. For two and a half centuries it has been the wish and work of her most cultivated minds to give human thought and life the highest expression; and this has been done with monumental activity. In Boston, culture and religious piety have never been decadent; over and above the controversies and schisms and sectarian quarrels which from time to time have rent the churches, they have remained intact. In spite of the manifold currents of opposing tendencies, which now and then threaten to overwhelm cherished beliefs and to lift the world off its hinges, they remain essential elements in this city's social life. They are stern present necessities, unwritten and immutable laws which she will not and cannot transgress. From the founding of the city by the "choice spirits" of the seventeenth century, they have retained their vitality and have been affirmed without doubt or debate. With the growing demands and maturity of her civilization she reiterates them as her loftiest and most sacred privileges, subject to no vicissitudes. With these primitive traits eternally vital, thought is quick, and intellectual enthusiasm spreads rapidly. Boston is always stirring with "new ideas" and with the passion for a broader ethical and religious development. The character and repute which she acquired in former days for literary taste, clerical influence, and the administration of religion are to-day influencing surrounding secularity and the hurrying concerns of daily life. They are animating every institution and ordinance, every supreme and exquisite medium of feeling, every revelation of truth and hope in the human mind. In this exhaustless tide of thought and aspiration, which we may accept as Boston's native product, it is easy to interest the people and to unite them in any attempt for the good of mankind under the sanction of culture, benevolence, or religion.

But religion is felt to be Boston's greatest need and glory. In this city of philosophy and poetry, art and business energy, religious faith and life have their proper place, and are invested with power and dignity. Fixed habit and traditional thought contribute, without doubt, to the need and sacredness of religion; yet its transcendent results are due to the permanent disposition of the people. They are the appropriate manifestation of a religious culture and spirit that are fitted for all time, the logic of truths born of religious intuitions working out in the most practical results. However universally certain religious beliefs are ignored, there is no disposition to put culture or philanthropy above the gospel, the school above the church, or to make the schoolmaster, the literary autocrat, or the princes of wealth take precedence of the preacher. The spirit of conventionalism reigns more or less in Boston's religious life; yet religion makes an irresistible appeal to the understanding, the conscience, and the heart. Everything is compelled to bow to its influence and to feel its inspiration. Although our churches present various theological tendencies, from the stiffest orthodoxy to the freest rationalism and pantheism, and with creeds yet confessedly nowhere settled, reason never pronounces religion absurd; to it homage is accorded. It is still the deepest and holiest interest of man. We all have an elevated sense of its vast importance in the destiny of mankind. Its manifestations may change, but its spirit is ever the same. While edifices of towering magnificence, grand displays of musical talent, time-honored ordinances, and attractions for popular reverence are fashionable and full of beauty and significance, and, possibly, prudent means to stimulate our patronage and to save to the ranks of the churches the votaries of all that is artistic and refining and impressive, they are no sure sign that spiritual life is departing; they have their utility, they foster the higher interests of mind and heart. These symbols of religious faith are not the productions of cold, speculative reasoning, but the statement of truth wrought into the convictions of the devout and spiritually minded.

Guided by these facts we may assume that the man who distinguishes himself in Boston as a preacher is one to whom considerable interest attaches. Upon such a man, as upon all her citizens of rare attainments and peculiar personal excellence, she confers distinction.

The Rev. Minot J. Savage, D. D., who recently changed his residence and his ministry from Boston to New York, and whose successful work in the former city may be a prophecy of enduring honors in the latter, has thus distinguished himself and been rewarded.

When Mr. Savage came from the West to Boston, he came "as a stranger," as I myself heard him say. For years he thought and walked and worked alone. He was unpopular, and he felt his unpopularity. All religious sects, even that of his own persuasion, were critical and sceptical. As a preacher he had fellowship nowhere. He was met as a preacher of unwelcome and unwholesome doctrines. But he came as one having a special dispensation, as the witness and repository of new truth, as the representative of no low and paltry type of the Christian ministry, but as a living testimony to the reality and power and excellency of religion and its institutions. He felt the difficulties with which he had to contend. They were manifold, subtle, and fraught with deepest peril to his ministry. Prejudices, precedents, and the theology of the schools--whose only merit seemed to be that it was smitten with a passion to reduce Christian doctrine to logical form--were arrayed in open hostility to him. He was met by the _regime_ of ecclesiastical orders, by men who preached the Gospel according to established and venerable routine, and whose credentials, not their wisdom, were their only power. But although he felt himself to be a _persona non grata_,--another unpopular person to suffer for his beliefs,--he girded himself for earnest uncompromising warfare. He planted against every church his strongest batteries of criticism, satire, and sarcasm. He poured forth his thoughts in words that made men's ears tingle, till the protestations of his adversaries fell from their lips with something of a hollow sound. Half preacher, half assassin, as he was thought to be, repudiating as offensive the doctrines of the Cross, and hating with every drop of his blood the general traditions and faith of the Church, he worked and awaited the day of his triumph. It came.

Boston is slow to recognize new prophets; yet religious belief of every kind is treated with gentleness and indulgence. The preachers of the city might regard Mr. Savage as a teacher of "positive error," but they could not object to the hospitality of Boston, a citizen and preacher of which Mr. Savage became on the footing of democratic fraternity. By the free development of reason and the spread of intelligence Boston has become temperate and tolerant. She will not enslave the understanding or deny anyone one vestige of religious freedom. With her, religion is a practical and spiritual thing rather than a theoretic and ceremonial. The latter helps to stimulate the former to the fullest discharge of duty, but does not in itself constitute religion. The one comes by internal necessity, the other belongs to the sphere of outward operation, of inventive and enterprising minds. Religion is a living mode of thought sustained by personal character, and needs not ambitious terminology or supervision. Boston trusts her instincts, as Emerson has taught her, and asks only ample scope for the imperative working of her religious sentiment and the life of the heart.

Under these favoring conditions, by which Boston, like a mother, works out her own character in the spirit and life of her gifted men, the Rev. Mr. Savage was impelled onward in his daring enterprise. With stern fidelity Boston exercised a definite and pervasive influence on Mr. Savage's mind. Although his religious thinking came upon the public like a new birth, he was only reiterating its progressive thought and the stout emphasis it placed on thinking out religion in intelligible terms and in all the breadth of its activities. Instrumental rather than absolute, Boston's versatile and expansive thought furnished the new preacher his coveted opportunity. Her faith failed not, nor did her courage falter. Silently she was assailing the old theology and elaborating the new, in which she has unhesitating belief, and which entered with enlightening and nourishing force into Mr. Savage's broad and free opinions. It came to him as the expression of the abiding atmosphere in which he dwelt and with a beneficent bearing on his ministry. Favored thus by the concurrent voices of those to whom he ministered, and by the general freedom and grace of the entire community, Mr. Savage made a real and salutary advance in his religious work in Boston. And supported by the judgment of an ever widening public, conservative thinkers about him felt his influence on current religious opinion. While he indulged a liberty of speculation, he instilled religious habits of thought and the spirit of worship into many inquiring minds, and enabled them to identify themselves with the highest development of his own religious consciousness. Boston and vicinity became fully appreciative of the distinctiveness of his mission and of his apprehensions of the truth. In recognition, therefore, of the unmeasured praise and enthusiastic acceptance which he received from the public, he was honored, at the close of his ministry in Boston, with the degree of Doctor of Divinity at Harvard University. Harvard thus expressed her highest confidence in the truth and permanence of his ministry. This famous institution of classic, scientific, philosophic, and sacred learning attested the sanity of the mind and doctrines of this once obscure and despised but now noted preacher.

II.

Another condition of the Rev. Minot J. Savage's influence and popularity as a preacher is his ethical intensity.

In the preceding section I have spoken of what has actually taken place. I have there shown the favoring conditions under which Mr. Savage labored in the city which was to him both friend and teacher, and where he has done his most efficient work as a preacher. The particular type of religious thought represented by him in the pulpit has not been brought about by his or any man's device. For generations it has been pouring itself forth from mind to mind in philosophy, science, poetry, and religious thought. He did not initiate any distinctive movement; he only helped to popularize and make permanent doctrines which already had found favor among the people. He emphasized these and vitalized anew their application to the Christian religion. In this section I shall devote myself to a study of the ethical intensity of his ministry.

The Rev. Mr. Savage's ministry of nearly a quarter of a century in Boston teaches some important lessons. And while he has had many critics, no one has yet displayed and made current his most emphatic qualities as a preacher. In attempting this the writer does so not from the standpoint of the theologian or the professional clergyman, but from that of a liberal thinker with mind unfettered by any prepossession.