resources and revenue alike been drained away and nothing left, either for home enterprise or improvement, nor for reserve capital with which to do business.

Cuba should have established a central railway system running the length of the Island from east to west, with branches extending on all sides, like its rivers, to the many good towns and harbours on both north and south coasts. Instead of this it has a little less than a thousand miles of line, operated by seven timid companies, extending in various directions, but leaving the two ends of the Island farther apart in actual days of travel than are New York and San Francisco. The capital city of Cuba, Havana, has within it the possibilities of a great and beautiful city; the commercial and industrial city of a prosperous country of five millions of people, and the winter health-resort for the rich and fashionable families of all North America. Its public buildings should have been of the best, its tropical parks and gardens the most fascinating in the world, its streets and pavements the most substantial, its healthfulness unquestioned, and its harbours and docks thronged with shipping and resonant with commercial activity. The merchants of Havana should rank among the richest and most prosperous in the world, and the business, manufacturing, and social interests of the place be equal to those of Boston or Baltimore or San Francisco. What applies to Havana applies only in a lesser degree to the other cities of Cuba, many of which are excellently located and should be important industrial and commercial centres, with numerous fields for the modern municipal enterprise which has done so much to improve the condition of the urban population of Europe and of the United States. Last, though not least, the Island should have been dotted over with the trinity of civilisation-the home, the schoolhouse, and the church. It is the lack of these three great elements of national strength and progress, underlying Cuba's ills, that is the cause of much of its misfortune.

The building of the home, the establishment of the

school, and the tolerance of religious worship in half a century changed Texas from a wilderness to a great and prosperous State, with the possibilities of an empire. These same forces, had full play been given them in Cuba during the same period, would have transformed that Island into all that has herein been depicted. Its resources are abundant to maintain five and even ten millions of persons, for only a small proportion of its area is populated. The climate is healthful and the dangers to those unacclimated which lurk in its seaport towns may all be controlled by sanitary and engineering science. That these possibilities have not been realised does not lie with Cuba itself, but is due to the numerous causes which have retarded and stopped its development, and which have finally, after years of strife and war, left the Island with population depleted, agriculture prostrate, industry destroyed, and commerce devastated.

It may be necessary for a clear view of the subject in hand to review briefly the causes which have led to this unhappy end; but, happily, a work dealing with the rehabilitation or industrial reconstruction of Cuba does not require the author either to dwell long upon nor to emphasise the gloomy side of the picture. The results of Spanish robbery and misrule speak too plainly. The reader has seen what Cuba might have been under an honest, stable government, or under the protecting ægis of the United States. The picture presented is not exaggerated, but is coloured by a moderate brush. What Cuba is, alas! is too well known to American and English readers to call for more than a brief summary of conditions as they existed when the author was requested by the President of the United States to visit the Island, report upon its industrial condition, and suggest plans for the relief of the population and for the commercial and industrial reconstruction of the country.

Visiting the Island immediately after the signing of the protocol of the cessation of hostilities between the United States and Spain, August 12, 1898, and again returning to Santiago in December after that province had been in charge

of the United States military authorities for nearly six months, he had ample and satisfactory opportunity for the study of conditions and future needs of the people. Surely the horrors and the desolating hand of war were never laid more heavily upon a once prosperous country. Nearly a third of the population wiped out by battle, wholesale slaughter, starvation, exposure, or disease, and a large proportion of those left enfeebled by deprivation and too weak to take up their occupations; the cane-fields and tobacco plantations, which formed the basis of prosperity, burned, and whole sections of country swept of every vestige of civilisation; sugar-centrals, houses, and structures of all kinds destroyed, and inhabitants either dead or huddled half starved in miserable huts near the towns and cities; not a living creature to be seen where once browsed innumerable cattle, and death, destruction, and desolation spread throughout this land that should, and under ordinary circumstances would, be as full of life and prosperity as the richest agricultural section of our own country.

Nor were the cities and towns exempted. Trade and commerce at a standstill; the few sickly manufacturing industries which at the best struggled under the most adverse conditions closed, the ruined buildings emphasising the scene of desolation. In Havana, the wharves and numerous large warehouses were empty, or converted into rendezvous and hospitals for Spanish troops. Hungry and discouraged, the native population stood listlessly on the streets and in the public places. At each station the railroad trains were boarded by half-starving women or children begging for bread or coppers. The principal signs of life were exhibited by the Spanish soldiers, who, with their blue cotton uniforms and Mauser rifles, seemed to form the greater part of the population of the cities and towns, while at the small country railroad stations the squads of woebegone soldiers alongside the blockhouses comprised the only living relief to miles of waste. The Cuban railways, like all other implements of industry in the unfortunate

Island, show evidences of the conflict. Stations burned, bridges destroyed, tracks torn up, freight-cars made into portable blockhouses, locomotives blown to pieces, and passenger-cars dilapidated and dingy. In short, a country more systematically pillaged, more infamously deprived of its resources, more wantonly plundered of its revenues, and a population more completely deprived of its rights by those who had every reason to foster and protect a valuable possession cannot be found recorded in ancient or modern history. Cuba, as it was left at the close of this year by the Spanish, who to the last moment seemed loth to leave the emaciated body which their inordinate greed had thus reduced, presents a picture so sad and sorrowful that, for the sake of our common humanity, it is better to draw a curtain over the past and direct attention to the happier omens which point to the possibilities of the future.

The work of industrial, commercial, and social reconstruction of Cuba must date from the eventful day when the Stars and Stripes were unfurled above Morro Castle. It is with this work that the present volume deals. Whatever form the government of Cuba may take, the responsibility of the commercial and industrial rehabilitation of the Island must rest with the United States. The power that forced the Spanish to evacuate the Island is the power which the world will hold responsible for the future welfare of its people. The timid, the weak, and the craven-hearted who contend that the United States has no responsibility, after it has assumed all responsibility, are entitled to no voice in the disposition of Cuba. The cost to the United States cannot be put in the balance against the duty of the United States. The moral obligation, therefore, toward Cuba and humanity must come first. The war was a war of humanity and not of conquest. The same principle must guide those upon whose shoulders will fall the more difficult task of restoring peace, forming a stable government, and reviving commerce and industry. For the United States to desert Cuba in its hour of greatest need would be more

inhuman than it would have been to have left it to Weyler and his policy of extermination. The plain duty of the hour, so far as the United States is concerned, and the best means of solving all political questions which may arise in connection with the Island, is to begin at once the work of economic or industrial reconstruction, postponing for future discussion all political questions. To this end the mission already referred to was projected. To this end a firm military government, capable of keeping law and order, will be established. To this end the attention of the people of Cuba should be at once directed toward the economic questions upon which depend the progress and prosperity of the population.

The destruction and disorganisation brought about by the war will make the work of placing the Island in a favourable economic condition costly and protracted, and many years must elapse before Cuba will take its rightful place in the economies of the world. By this is meant the position to which its resources and location entitle it. If it is true, and I doubt it not, that the causes which have led to war, both in 1868 and in 1895, were more economic than political (and the greater importance of economic over political questions in such a colony of small and mixed population as Cuba is easy to understand), then Cuba to-day is free. The Spanish Government would have more willingly granted political freedom to Cuba had it not been for the wellgrounded fear that economic concessions would have necessarily followed. Those United States officials who have been in Cuba since the signing of the protocol of peace understand this fully. The United States Military Commissioners, in their daily intercourse with Spanish officials, have found no sentiment of resentment toward the United States. The regrets have all been of a sordid character and may be summed up in loss of revenue and commerce for Spain.

The war which has just been brought to an end really began in 1868. Although between 1878 and 1895 there was