his is done that the problem was an
absolutely new one for the young officer of thirty-seven to whom it
was presented.

Nobody can really conceive of the unbelievable condition of affairs
unless he actually saw it or has at some time in his life witnessed a
corresponding situation. Those who return from the battlefields on the
Western Front of the Great War describe the scenes and show us
pictures and we think we realize the horrors of destruction, yet one
after another of us as we go there comes back with the same statement:
"I had heard all about it, but I hadn't the least conception of what
it really was until I saw it with my own eyes."

In like manner we who are accustomed to reasonably clean and
well-policed cities can call up no {102} real picture of what the
Cuban cities were in those days, unless we saw them, or something like
them.

Yet in spite of this it is necessary to try to give some idea of the
fact, in order to give some idea of the work of reorganization
required.

For four hundred years Cuba had been under the Spanish rule--the rule
of viceroys and their agents who came of a race that has for centuries
been unable to hold its own among the nations of the earth. Ideas of
health, drainage, sanitation, orderly government, systematic
commercial life--all were of an order belonging to but few spots in
the world to-day. Here and there in the East--perhaps in what has been
called the "cesspool of the world," Guayaquil, Ecuador--and in other
isolated spots there are still such places, but they are fortunately
beginning to disappear as permanent forms of human life.

In Santiago there were about 50,000 inhabitants. These people had been
taxed and abused by officials who collected and kept for themselves
the funds of the Province. Fear of showing wealth, since it was
certain to be confiscated, led all classes of families to hide what
little they had. {103} Money for the city and its public works there
was none, since all was taken for the authorities in Spain or for
their representatives in Cuba. Spanish people in any kind of position
treated the natives as if they were slaves--as indeed they were. No
family was sure of its own legitimate property, its own occupation and
its own basic rights. The city government was so administered as to
deprive all the citizens of any respect for it or any belief in its
statements, decrees or laws. Not only was this condition of affairs in
existence at the time of the w