Excerpt from The War of Spain: A Complete History of the War of 1898 Between the United States and Spain The true mission of the United States may be held to be peace, not war; production, not destruction; industry, not rapine. But even to the most peacefully inclined of nations occasions come which irresistibly demand that the sword shall be drawn and blows be struck, and through one of these periods of violence this country has just passed. It has had to deal with a nation not yet in the nineteenth century, a belated relic of the mediaeval age, and has found it necessary to employ forcible methods. War is an evil, but there are greater evils only to be met by war, national diseases which only the strongest remedies can cure. 'Spain's colonial system has been such a disease, one with which only heroic treatment would avail. It has been a system of despotism and enslavement, of the suppression of insurrection by massacre and starvation, and of obstinate adherence to methods long since outlived by other civilized nations. The state of affairs had grown intolerable when the United States took up the sword for the relief of a starving and perishing people, and began a war based upon the highest of motives, that of humane sympathy and the succor of the oppressed. This country has been accused of a selfish greed for the territory of Spain; but it may be safely said that no purpose of territorial aggrandizement was among the motives that inspired the war. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."