them credit for the whole thing.

Next came the necessity for inculcating the idea of government of the
people by the people. Six months after taking office General Wood had
appointed a commission on a general election law, had adopted a plan
much after our own electoral laws with the Australian ballot system
and a limited suffrage, had prepared in his own office in Havana all
the ballots, ballot boxes, circulars describing election rules and had
successfully held throughout Cuba the first real election ever known
on the island--ever known to the people. Municipal officials and local
representatives were chosen everywhere by the people themselves for
the first time in their lives.

{136}

Whether such a thing would be successful and prove effective the
Governor-General did not know. But he knew that it was the right thing
to do if they were ever to govern themselves; he trusted them--and he
took the risk.

Next--or rather at the same time with these two basic lines of
constructive building--came the school system. When the United States
took over the Island the school system was non-existent. There was not
one single schoolhouse belonging to the State anywhere on the Island.
There were no schools at all except private and church schools and
very few of them. Children in the mass did not attend school. There
was no foundation to build on. The whole school system had to be
created new from the bottom to the top. That schools were another of
the main beams of this new house is self-evident. Yet the action taken
was much more far-seeing than would have been possible without a
single autocrat to decree, and without a man who could see many years
ahead.

"I knew," said the Governor-General in one of his reports, "that we
were going to establish a {137} government of and by the people in
Cuba and that it was going to be transferred to them at the earliest
possible moment; and I believed that the success of the future
government would depend as much upon the foundation and extension of
its public schools as upon any other factor, that such a system must
be entirely in the hands of the people of the island."

This was the situation when in the beginning of 1900 within a month
after taking office Wood selected a young West Pointer who had been a
teacher to draw up a school system and school laws. The result was an
adaptation of the Ohio and Massachusetts School Systems; and when in
1902 the Island was turned over to the C