No. 275.
Mr. Cushing to Mr. Fish.
Madrid , May 17, 1875. (Received June 3.)
Sir: I have made only incidental reference to Brigadier Burriel in recent dispatches; but I have not lost sight of him, or, I might rather say, of his case; for he himself has quite disappeared from public view, having slunk away, it is said, into some obscure corner of Galicia. In fact, the whole affair has proved, as it ought, to be a calamitous one to him. Although some of his friends timidly suggest in his behalf that he acted under a mistaken sense of duty, still the reprobation excited by similar acts on the part of the Carlists, such as the affair of Olot and that of Cuenca, neutralizes all efforts to justify or extenuate his conduct.
[Page 513]You will readily conceive that considerations of public policy on the part of the government, both that of President Serrano and that of King Alphonso, will have tended to produce condemnation of all such acts; and the public indignation is kept alive by new incidents. Thus, not long since, the Carlist chief, Mendiri, shot by decimation a number of prisoners at Estella, on some frivolous cause of complaint, for the purpose of terrorizing the soldiers of the army of the north. Everybody is rejoicing to learn that the German government, on the application of Spain, ordered the extradition of D. Alphonso de Este, because of the acts perpetrated by him at Cuenca; and that, for the same cause, the inhabitants of Gratz, in Styria, where he had taken refuge, have mobbed him and his wife in the streets, driven him out of the cathedral, and attacked him in his dwelling-house.
In these circumstances, the Spanish government is neither disposed nor able to defend military executions; and tempted, as it has been, to retaliate in the same way on the Carlists, it abstains, and limits itself to issuing an order for the transportation of a certain number of Carlist prisoners in retorsion of the execution of soldiers of the government. Thus it is that, while nobody can efficiently defend Burriel, he remains without promotion; humiliated by seeing that his government is humiliated on account of his acts, and is forced, as it were, to throw a mantle of gold over the blood he shed, by paying heavy sums to the United States and to Great Britain for the relief of the families of the victims of Santiago de Cuba, and subject himself to the process of residencia. Of course, the government looks with no friendly eye on an officer who has drawn upon it so much reproach, exposed it to so much complaint and tribulation, and thrown upon it so much expenditure. Knowing that his case was before a council of war, it did not seem to be necessary to do more than allude to it occasionally with Mr. Castro, while the matter of the indemnity was on the carpet.
* * * I shall have been on official duty here just one year on the 30th instant; and I trust, ere that day arrives, to be able to report to you a solution in principle, if not in detail and fact, of all our reclamations against Spain.
I have, &c.,