vessels and other
receptacles in which water was necessarily kept. These were the same
methods which Major--since Major General--Gorgas a few years later
applied with distinguished success for the elimination of yellow fever
from the Isthmus of Panama and thus rendered possible the construction
of the interoceanic canal.

[Illustration: STREET IN VEDADO, SUBURB OF HAVANA]

Begun in February, 1901, this work in Havana was so vigorously and
skilfully prosecuted that before summer every case of yellow fever had
disappeared from that city and its environs. During the summer a few
cases occurred, but the last of them was disposed of early in September.
That was the last case of yellow fever to originate in a city which for
a century and a half had annually been scourged by that disease. Since
that date the only cases that have been known there have been a few
which were imported from less sanitary ports--at one time Havana had to
establish a fever quarantine against United States ports! Thus the
island which had long suffered reproach as the especial home of one of
the deadliest of diseases, as a veritable plague-spot, which American
life insurance companies forbade their policy holders to visit, became
noted for its freedom from that scourge and for its general salubrity.

A similar campaign was also conducted against another variety of
mosquito which, by a like series of experiments, had been proved to be
the propagating medium of so-called malarial fevers; with highly
gratifying results.

Among the important reforms effected by General Wood was that of the
entire system of law and justice. It began with the penal institutions.
When the Americans assumed control, they found the old Spanish prison
system still in existence. Most of the prisons were antiquated,
unsanitary and inhuman structures, to enter which was ominous for the
body, the mind and the soul. There was no segregation of prisoners
according to age or degree of criminality. Mere boys, sentenced for some
slight misdemeanor, were herded in with adult felons of the most
hardened and incorrigible type. Many had been confined for months, even
years, awaiting trial. They had been arrested, locked up in default of
bail, and then practically forgotten. Of these many were innocent of
any wrong-doing; while some of those who were probably guilty were kept
in confinement awaiting trial for a much longer term than they could
have been sentenced for under the law if the