The other sound reorganization of a delicate nature was the action of the Governor-General in revising a law which made marriages only legal if {148} performed by a judge and ignoring the church ceremony altogether. The changed law recognized either church or civil marriage and quieted the most serious of all family troubles in the Island. Finally a constitutional convention was planned and held, at which a constitution of the republican form based upon that of the United States was framed and adopted; an electoral law for elections in the Cuban republic was also adopted; and the general administrative law of the land was rewritten and adapted so that the government of the Island could be turned over to its inhabitants in workable form even though that form was new to them and they new to self-government in any form. Look for a moment at the result of this work. In December, 1899, Leonard Wood took command of the Island of Cuba. In May, 1902, he turned over that Island to its own inhabitants. In 1899 except for the military work done by the American Army the Island contained Spaniards who had for years been its autocratic rulers and who had recently been defeated in a war; and Cubans who {149} had for years been governed by a tyrant race. In 1902 these two century-old hostile groups, neither of whom had ever had any real experience in modern representative government, received their country at the hands of the Americans with new laws, with a republican form of government, with their own kind for rulers elected by their own people, and began an existence that has now been running long enough to prove that the work was so well performed for them as to make the impossible possible--the rotten kingdom, a clean republic; the decayed colony, an independent, proud democracy. It is a piece of work unparalleled in the annals of history. And the closing episodes which occurred in Havana are a witness to the affection and pride in which the people held the man who had accomplished it, the nation which had ordered it and their Island which was the scene of its happening.