further, the determination of the United States, pacification having been accomplished, “to leave the government and control of the island to its people.”  There was no pledge of any prolonged course of education in principles and methods of self-government.  Nor did such education play any appreciable part in the experience of the American military government.  The work of the interventors had been done in accordance with the specifications, and the Cubans were increasingly restless under a control that many of them, with no little reason, declared to be as autocratic as any ever exercised by Spain.  Transfer and departure seemed to be the politic if not the only course, and we transferred and departed.

That these people, entirely without experience or training in self-government, should make mistakes was quite as inevitable as it is that a child in learning to walk will tumble down and bump its little nose.  In addition to the inevitable mistakes, there have been occasional instances of deplorable misconduct on the part of individuals and of political parties.  For neither mistakes nor misconduct can we criticize or condemn them without a similar criticism or condemnation of various experiences in our own history.  We should, at least, regard them with charity.  There are, moreover, incidents in the two experiences of American control of the island that, at least, border on the unwise and the discreditable.  The only issue yet developed in Cuba is between good government and bad politics.  The first President started admirably along the line of the former, and ended in a wretched tangle of the latter, though not at all by his own choice or direction.  Official pre-eminence and a “government job” make quite the same appeal to the Cubans that they do to many thousands of Americans.  So do raids on the national treasury, and profitable concessions.  We see these motes in Cuban eyes somewhat more clearly than we see the beams in our own eyes.  A necessarily slow process of political education is going on among the people, but in the meantime the situation has afforded opportunity for exploitation by an assortment of self-constituted political leaders who have adopted politics as a profession and a means of livelihood.  Cuba’s gravest danger lies in the political domination of men in this class.  The present President, General Mario Menocal, is not in that group.  The office sought him; he did not seek the office.  Some of these self-constituted leaders have displayed a notable aptitude for political organization, and it is largely by means of the many little local organizations that the Cuban political game is played.  Although, I believe, somewhat less now than formerly, the little groups follow and support individual leaders rather than parties or principles.  Parties and their minor divisions are known by the names of their leaders.  Thus, while both men are nominally of the same party, the Liberal, the adherents of Jose Miguel Gomez, are