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How General Goethals Made Good
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splintered rock. In the afternoon he does his office work, and it is often late at night when he switches off the light over his desk.

The time to see General Goethals at his best is on Sunday morning, when he sits in his dingy office at Culebra to give justice to all who come and ask for it. It is a scene as simple and as impressive as that of the good King Haroun-al-Raschid hearing his people's troubles, and judging between them, by the gate of Bagdad. Every man or woman who has a complaint of ill-treatment, or a suggestion for the improvement of the work, can walk in and tell it to the man at the top. Where else in the world could a laborer's wife, who is tired of getting tough meat from the butcher, say so to the head of a great business—a business so great that its monthly pay-roll is over $2,000,000—and have him not only listen to her courteously, but also attend to the matter himself?

General Goethals considers it part of his duty to make sixty-five thousand men, women and children satisfied with their houses, the furniture and plumbing therein, their food as supplied by the commissary or served at the hotels and messes, their washing as done by the government laundry, their amusements at the baseball parks, club-houses and band concerts, their chapels and lodges, the railroad and steamship service, the electric-light meters, the dentists, and even the icemen,—in the tropics at that. Everything, from the building and fortifying of the Canal, to explaining to Mrs. Jones why Mrs. Smith, whose husband gets twenty dollars less salary a month than hers, has received two more salt-cellars and