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He is known as the "Butcher," and his management of affairs in Cuba certainly gives him every right to the title. Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau, to give him his full name, is only half a Spaniard. His father was a Prussian, though Weyler himself was born in Cadiz in 1839. His parents were in very moderate circumstances and not of noble birth.
All the good that can be said of him politically has been briefly and admirably summed up by Francesco Vettori; the picture of Leo's pleasures is given by Paolo Giovio and in the anonymous biography; and the shadows which attended his prosperity are drawn with inexorable truth by the same Pierio Valeriano.
This time it is a Greek book which we open; it has the works of the Christian apologists Athenagoras and Tatian, and a spurious epistle of Justin Martyr, copied in 1534 by Valeriano of Forlí. A single MS. now at Paris, written in 914, is the ancestor of all our copies of these texts; but it has been shown that this Eton book is not an immediate copy of that, but of one now at Bologna.
A "reconcentration" order, promulgated by Valeriano Weyler, Governor-general of the island and General-in-chief of the army, compelled the rural population to herd together in the garrisoned towns. Their buildings were then burned and their cattle driven away or killed; hygienic precautions were disregarded and the people themselves were insufficiently clothed and fed.
The Capitan-General, with ten thousand men, vainly strove to check this terrible advance, but the insurgents easily eluded him and forced their way into the western provinces; with the result that the home Government superseded Campos, sending out in his stead General Don Valeriano y Nicolan Weyler, a man of wide military experience, and possessing a sinister and unenviable reputation for energy and relentless severity.
As a type of the happy scholar, he mentions Fra Urbano Valeriano of Belluno, who was for years a teacher of Greek at Venice, who visited Greece and the East, and towards the close of his life travelled, now through this country, now through that, without ever mounting a horse; who never had a penny of his own, rejected all honours and distinctions, and after a gay old age, died in his eighty-fourth year, without, if we except a fall from a ladder, having ever known an hour of sickness.
Then every shade of difference in the style of the ancients was studied with closer and doser attention till the consoling conclusion was at last reached that in Cicero alone was the perfect model to be found, or, if all forms of literature were to be embraced, in 'that immortal and almost heavenly age of Cicero. Men like Pietro Bembo and Pierio Valeriano now turned all their energies to this one object.
In 1896 it commissioned Valeriano Weyler, an officer who personified ferocity, to put down the rebellion. If the insurgents had fancied that the conciliatory spirit hitherto displayed by the Spaniards was due to irresolution or weakness, they found that these were not the qualities of their new opponent.
To show how little liberty of opinion the newspapers of Cuba enjoy, we quote a decree issued by General Weyler, formerly Captain-General of the island: Don Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau, Marquis of Tenerife, governor- general, captain-general of the Island of Cuba, and general-in- chief of this army. Under the authority of the law of public order, dated the 23rd of April, 1870. I Order and Command,
Of all his military operations, this "pacification" of the western towns and provinces was the most conspicuously successful and the one which gave Valeriano Weyler the keenest satisfaction; for nowhere did rebellion lift its head except, perhaps, among the ranks of those disaffected men who hid in the hills, with nothing above them but the open sky.
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