It was a very bold step. No other country on earth had ever spent so large a portion of its revenue on education. The appropriations in the United States to-day are pitiful in comparison--and yet our country is supposed to be doing pretty well by its future citizens. Again the step taken by the Governor-General was a piece of construction of the main essentials--of the things that make no show, but build, always build. American teachers were not employed, in order that the Cubans filled with suspicion of what the invaders were going to do might not be led to believe that there was any attempt being made to "Americanize" the Island. But on the other hand in the summer of 1900 one thousand of these new Cuban teachers were invited with all their expenses paid to spend several months at Harvard University in Cambridge and learn something of American pedagogy. The preparations for transporting this large number and handling them during their stay in the United States involved a large amount of work, but the trip was carried through without mishap or accident of any kind, and the thousand teachers returned to {139} their homes in the Island not only with the great benefit resulting from this instruction, but with the immense stimulus of a visit to an organized and comparatively smoothly running civilization. What they saw was of even greater benefit to them in the long run than what they learned in their summer courses. At this time the city of Havana was a fever-ridden, dangerous city. Yellow fever and other tropical diseases existed always and blazed up into epidemics at certain seasons of the year. Such systems of drainage as existed emptied into the harbor or into the street gutters. A beginning had been made to cleanse the city before Wood took charge, but little had been done in the smaller cities of the Island, all of which were in somewhat the same condition as Santiago in 1898 except for the added scourge in the latter city resulting from its siege. Nevertheless different methods had to be used in Havana. It is impossible here to go into the mass of detail in the appointing of commissions to carry out the different sanitary works that were required in Havana and all over the Island {140} in cities, towns and country districts. But, familiar as it now is, there will never be an account of this work which has made Cuba one of the healthiest places to live in either in or out of the tropics--there will never be a description so short that it cannot tell of the work of the unselfish, altruistic group of physicians who solved the yellow fever problem for all time. It gives him who writes even now something of a thrill to tell a little of it again and to pay tribute to the man who organized the work and to the men who carried it out under his unfailing support and encouragement. It is the greatest achievement of medicine since the discovery of the smallpox vaccine. It is one of the bright spots in the history of mankind.