It is impossible to state the relative importance of this work without appearing to overdo it. Yet if we could but collect the tributes that have been paid to Wood upon its accomplishment they {195} would make a volume, Richard Olney wrote: "... to congratulate you personally on the most successful and deservedly successful career, whether as soldier or public man of any sort, that the Spanish War and its consequences have brought to the front." John Hay, then Secretary of State, wrote Wood a note "with sincere congratulations on the approaching fruition of all your splendid work for the regeneration of Cuba," and Senator Platt, of Connecticut, wrote of his "admiration for your administration under difficulties greater I think than have ever had to be encountered by any one man in reconstruction work." So the record of two statesmenlike and administrative works stands to this day as a witness of Wood's qualities.
In 1905 after a visit to the United States he returned to the islands and became commander-in-chief of the American forces in the Philippines, General Bliss taking his place as Governor of the Moros, who were now established under a basic form of government and procedure which Wood had inaugurated.
By 1908 this work was practically completed {196} and the procedure laid out for the future rule of that part of the Philippines. At that time General Wood was transferred to Governor's Island in New York Harbor as Commander of the Department of the East, strangely enough the first command he had held within the United States since the Geronimo days in the Southwest.
There followed in the next six years a diplomatic mission as special Ambassador to the Argentine Republic upon the occasion of the centenary of Argentina, where he met and talked with General von der Groltz, the German officer, who had so much to do with the Great War later. From this meeting Wood absorbed more of the necessity for universal military training and more of the aversion to a standing army such as existed in Germany. After this mission he became the head of the American military forces under the President of the United States and for four years held the position of Chief of Staff.
Thus beginning his army life in 1886 as an army surgeon he rose in twenty-two years to the highest position in the regular army that any one can hold. That, in a sense, closes a certain {197} period in General Wood's career. For when in 1914 he was again made Commander of the Department of the East he had already started upon his campaign of national preparation which had been growing and growing in his mind as he lived and served his own nation and observed and studied other nations. The knowledge he had acquired in the four quarters of the earth showed to him conclusively that a nation must be ready to resist attack in order to live in peace, and yet that that nation must not spend all its wealth and time and brains in building up a military machine. In a strange way the attitude of this New England "Mayflower" descendant resembled the attitude of his own native Cape Cod, which stands at the outposts of New England with its clenched fist ready and prepared, yet which lives on quietly in the lives of its inhabitants who proceed in peace with their commercial occupations and their family existence.
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THE PATRIOT
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