The city had no drainage system except the {104} open gutter of the streets--never had had. The water system consisted of an elemental sort of dam six miles up in the hills outside the city, old, out of repair, constantly breaking down, and a single 11-inch pipe which had a capacity of 200,000 gallons a day for the city--something like four gallons to a person. This was not sufficient for more than one-quarter of each day. In other words the city at the best was receiving for years only one-quarter of the water it absolutely needed for cleanliness. Plagues and epidemics, smallpox, yellow fever, bubonic plague, typhus and tetanus followed one another in regular succession. The streets for years had contained dead animals and many times in epidemics dead human beings--sights to which the citizens had been so accustomed throughout their lives that they paid no attention to them. The authorities being accustomed to keeping the public moneys for their own use spent little or nothing upon public works, cleaning the streets or making improvements. They did not build; they did not replace; they only patched and repaired when it was absolutely necessary. It was {105} a situation difficult to conceive, impossible to realize. Yet one must constantly bear in mind that there not only appeared to be nothing out of the ordinary in this, but in reality there was nothing out of the ordinary. It was the accustomed, usual thing and had been so for centuries. The sense of personal responsibility to the community was not dormant; it did not exist. The sense of duty of those who governed to those whom they governed was not repressed by modern corruption only; it had ceased to exist altogether. No city official was expected to do anything but get what he could out of those under him. No citizen knew anything but the necessity--to him the right--of concealing anything he had, of deceiving everybody whom he could deceive and of evading any law that might be promulgated. The integrity of the family and its right to live as it chose within restrictions required by gregarious existence had disappeared--never had existed at all so far as those living knew. The responsibility of the individual to his government was unconceivable and inconceivable. Had all this not been so there would have been {106} no war on our part with Spain, for the whole origin of the trouble which eventually led to war grew out of the final despair of men and women in Cuba who gradually came to realize in a dim way that something was wrong and unfair. Out of this grew internal dissension which constantly spilled over to interfere with international relations.