ubans three thousand eight
hundred schools were in operation in good schoolhouses, with native
teachers well paid, with 256,000 pupils, and at an expenditure of
$4,000,000 a year out of a total annual state revenue of $17,000,000.
In other words nearly one-quarter of the Island's revenue had been
spent on the education of children to make them good and
self-respecting citizens where nothing whatever had been spent before.

{138}

It was a very bold step. No other country on earth had ever spent so
large a portion of its revenue on education. The appropriations in the
United States to-day are pitiful in comparison--and yet our country
is supposed to be doing pretty well by its future citizens. Again the
step taken by the Governor-General was a piece of construction of the
main essentials--of the things that make no show, but build, always
build.

American teachers were not employed, in order that the Cubans filled
with suspicion of what the invaders were going to do might not be led
to believe that there was any attempt being made to "Americanize" the
Island. But on the other hand in the summer of 1900 one thousand of
these new Cuban teachers were invited with all their expenses paid to
spend several months at Harvard University in Cambridge and learn
something of American pedagogy. The preparations for transporting this
large number and handling them during their stay in the United States
involved a large amount of work, but the trip was carried through
without mishap or accident of any kind, and the thousand teachers
returned to {139} their homes in the Island not only with the great
benefit resulting from this instruction, but with the immense stimulus
of a visit to an organized and comparatively smoothly running
civilization. What they saw was of even greater benefit to them in the
long run than what they learned in their summer courses.

At this time the city of Havana was a fever-ridden, dangerous city.
Yellow fever and other tropical diseases existed always and blazed up
into epidemics at certain seasons of the year. Such systems of
drainage as existed emptied into the harbor or into the street
gutters. A beginning had been made to cleanse the city before Wood
took charge, but little had been done in the smaller cities of the
Island, all of which were in somewhat the same condition as Santiago
in 1898 except for the added scourge in the latter city resulting from
its siege.

Nevertheless different methods