RECOLLECTIONS OF FULL YEARS
it was decided that Mr. Taft should undertake the task of Cuban pacification, peaceful if possible-and on September 20 Mr. Taft, accompanied by Mr. Robert Bacon, Assistant Secretary of State, as a fellow Peace Commissioner, landed at Havana. They didn't lose much time.
Then began what Mr. Taft always refers to as "those awful twenty days." The people were divided into various warring factions, the result, largely, of political habits in- herited from the old Spanish régime wherein a new party arose on the slightest provocation, basing its antagonism to the others on nothing finer nor more patriotic than individual desire for political patronage.
President Palma still held the reins of government, but camped just outside Havana were twenty thousand men under arms ready at any moment to open hostilities. These insurgents, as well as the party in power, had appealed to the United States for intervention, but neither faction had any intention of accepting any form of compromise which did not include all their demands.
For about a week the fiercest storm that Mr. Taft had ever encountered raged about his head. His one immediate de- sire was to avoid bloodshed. His investigations proved that no real obstacle to tranquillity, or to compromise, existed and he made every effort to induce the Cubans to settle their differences on high non-partisan grounds, each yielding some- thing to the other for the sake of the general good. But he found very little interest in the "general good." Indeed, all through his despatches during those days there runs a complaint that except with President Palma and a few others patriotism was not very apparent, that petty jealousies and personal ambitions, often of a brazen or a sordid nature, con- stituted the chief secret of all the dissension and strife.
Events must have moved with feverish rapidity. The insurrectos demanded the annulment of the election which
continued the Palma government in power, and the situa-
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