the military government of Cuba.]

That is the story of a work that has made Cuba a healthy land, that
has freed the southern part of the United States forever from the
dread disease, that has made the building of the Panama Canal a
possibility and the Canal Zone healthier in death rate per thousand
than New York City, that has finally rid the earth of yellow fever as
vaccine rid it of smallpox and typhoid, and as the discoveries during
the Great War have made it possible to check tetanus and typhus and
bubonic plague.

It was done--the work was done--by the doctors named and their
assistants and the many men who took up the burden in other places and
carried on. All honor to them! But the man who approved the idea, who
took the risk and the responsibility and backed up those who worked--
the man who kept in touch with it day by day and {145} saw that it was
carried through--was Leonard Wood.

Simultaneously with these basic administrative activities many other
lines of constructive state building were inaugurated, under the same
administrative plan--the plan of the appointment of a specialist or a
commission of specialists to draw up plans and report to the
Governor-General who then decided and started the actual work of
reorganization.

A railroad law was written, and General Wood persuaded General
Grenville M. Dodge and Sir William Van Horn to help him to build much
of the present railway system of Cuba. Hard modern roads took the
place of the muddy routes almost impassable at certain seasons of the
year which had been the only means of communication throughout the
island. Hospitals and charities were grouped under a new organization
consisting almost entirely of Cubans which renovated old hospitals,
built new ones, put children first into temporary homes and then did
away practically with asylums as soon as the destitute children could
be put out among the Cuban families who {146} took them under a newly
made law. Thus, in so far as was possible, no child from that time
forward grew up with the stigma of an orphan asylum resting upon him
or her, but had the chance offered to become in time a self-respecting
inhabitant of a self-respecting community.

Immense sums were disbursed by the military government in public
works, harbor improvements, lighthouses which had almost ceased to
exist, post offices and postal systems, telephone and telegraph
connections, offices and organizations and an entirely new system of