From time to time the old bishop, tired with the exertion of swinging the censer with the holy water, would hand it to Wood and ask him to continue the function by his side until he could secure a slight respite. Occasionally as he leaned forward to bless the thousands who lined the way and who had come to feel his touch and kiss his hand his miter would slip to one side on his head and the unperturbed American general would lean forward and straighten it for him. Each time the old bishop turned to him and murmured, "Thank God, you are here! I am so old that I could not have made this journey, if you had not been here to help me." Wood told him that he was not a Catholic, that indeed from Bishop Bernaba's point of view he was a heretic and bound for Hell. "No," said the bishop, with a smile, "you are a good Catholic; only you do not know it." Small wonder that when he left Santiago in the spring of 1899 to visit the United States Wood was presented by the people of the city with a magnificent hand-work scroll which said in Spanish: {126} "The people of the City of Santiago de Cuba to General Leonard Wood ... the greatest of all your successes is to have won the confidence and esteem of a people in trouble." Small wonder that in December, 1899, less than a year after the United States took over the island, he was appointed by President McKinley Governor General of Cuba and made a Major General of United States Volunteers! {127} THE ADMINISTRATOR {128} {129} VI THE ADMINISTRATOR It has been said that General Wood's work in Havana as Governor-General of Cuba was the continuation of his work at Santiago on a larger scale. This would seem to be erroneous. The Santiago problem was the cleaning and reorganizing of a city of 60,000 inhabitants. Many stringent measures could properly be put into operation in such a community which were quite impossible in a city of 350,000 inhabitants like Havana, or in a state of two and one-half million people such as the Island of Cuba. It was possible in an epidemic to close up houses temporarily, stop business and commercial intercourse for a period where only 60,000 people were concerned. But to stop the daily commerce of a large city, the capital of a state, was out of the question. Furthermore the problem in the first instance was one of organizing a community in so {130} deplorable a condition that it was on the verge of anarchy. In the second instance much of the cleaning-up process had been at least begun by other American officers. It was here in Havana a case of administration and statecraft as against organization. It was the taking of a crown colony of Spain--a kingdom--which had never been anything but a royal colony, and turning it in two years and a half into a republic, self-governed, self-judged, self-administered and self-supporting.