reports calmly. He also feared that the pressure on Congress would be so great, should the actual conditions become known, that taken in conjunction with the Maine disaster, the national legislature would at once declare war against Spain and thereby endanger the lives of all the American consuls and citizens in the island.

He therefore appointed a court of inquiry to investigate the cause of the disaster. After sitting for six weeks and making an exhaustive investigation, the Court rendered a report which, summarized in a few words, simply stated that the destruction of the Maine was due to the explosion of an exterior mine. Chadwick says:

"This finding was chiefly based upon the extraordinary manner in which the keel was forced up at the center of the explosive effort, thirty-four feet above its normal position. As the ship settled but from four to six feet before touching bottom, it would seem impossible that any launching forward of the after body could have produced such an effect. Two other considerations added weight to the board's findings: the first, that the only ship of the American navy ever so destroyed had to wait to arrive in an unfriendly port before the catastrophe should be accom. plished; the second, the wholly different effects of the explosion of the forward magazine of the Oquendo after the Santiago action. The finding of the board in no way implicated the Spanish government, and the writer, as a member of the board, can state explicitly that no member of the board held such a view."

tributed to the direct act of a Spanish official.' Its intervention rested upon the ground that there existed in Cuba conditions so injurious to the United States, as a neighboring nation, that they could no longer be endured. Its action was analogous to what is known in private law as the abatement of a nuisance.". Moore, American Diplomacy, p. 142. See also Lee and Wheeler, Cuba's Struggle, pp. 133-138.

Consisting of Captain William T. Sampson, president, Captain French E. Chadwick and Lieutenant-Commander William P. Potter. †Transmitted to Congress March 28.

Under great provocation and in the face of a storm of protests against further delay, President McKinley displayed remarkable courage in resisting the attempts to declare war immediately. He exhausted all means whereby the problem might be peacefully solved, but he was ultimately compelled to yield to the inevitable. Reluctant though he might be to plunge the nation into the frightful fatalities and consequences of war, still, when the die had been cast, he felt that equal energy should be used to make the war short and conclusive but withal tempered with as much mercy and kindness as circumstances would permit. He had hoped, though vainly, as events subsequently proved, that the sense of justice in Spain would defer the awful reckoning until peaceful measures had removed any possible reason for a declaration of war. But Spain, with dim recollections of past grandeur and with exalted visions of vast dominions and undisputed power in the future, stalked blindly on toward humiliation, entirely unmindful of the lessons to be learned on every page of the world's history, and apparently scarcely heeding the warnings of danger in further opposing the "just and righteous anger of a nation scorned."

F. E. Chadwick, The War with Spain, article 42 under United States History in Encylopedia Americana. See also President McKinley's message of March 28, 1898, transmitting the report, Richardson, Messages and Papers, vol. x., pp. 136-139; Lee and Wheeler, Cuba's Struggle, pp. 198-201, also pp. 623-636, giving Wainwright's description of the disaster; Wilcox, War with Spain, pp. 51-57; Henry Cabot Lodge, The War with Spain, p. 31 et seq.