3-086-186 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Spanish-American War: the war fever in Spain: "down with the American Eagle!", 1898. Spanish civilians symbolically dousing the US crest in a fountain. 'Drawn by G. Amato. As has not infrequently been the case in the course of the world's history, the formal declaration of war between Spain and the United States found both nations but partially equipped for serious combat, and the first week of war was chiefly occupied with the final arming for the fray and the opening moves in the great struggle which, it is now obvious, means war in grim and deadly earnest, a war in which not Cuba alone is to be at stake, but the Philippine Islands, and the complex questions of international import to Europe that are gathered around them - a war, in short, which, whatever be its precise outcome, marks an epoch in the relations of the New World to the Old...The insult offered to the American arms which forms the subject of [our] drawing was but one of a number of popular demonstrations of Spanish hostility to the United States in Madrid and other large centres.' From "Illustrated London News", 1898.