Summer Cottage of the Captain-General, Havana. Mule Cart, Havana. The Cuban Village of El Caney. Courtyard of Cuban House, Havana. The Cathedral of Havana. Havana of the Past, Barracks Erected in 1573. Cathedral Street, Santiago de Cuba. View of Matanzas, Cuba. Church of Monserrate, Matanzas, Cuba. The Plaza, Matanzas, Cuba. Suburban Residence Street, Matanzas, Cuba. Plaza de Armas, Havana. Drive to Caves of Bellamar, Matanzas. Interior of Caves of Bellamar. Sugar Mill near Culea, Cuba. Passenger Boat Landing in the Harbor of Havana. BOOK IV. The Annexation of Hawaii. Sugar Cane Plantation, Hawaii. Main Street, Honolulu. The Atherton Residence, Honolulu. Native Grass House near Pearl Harbor. Luau, or Open Air Feast, Hawaii. An Island in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. American Engineers in Pearl Harbor. Planting Rice, Hawaii.-Pineapple Ranch, Hawaii. Natives of Hawaii Making "Poi." President Dole and Senator Morgan at a "Luau."-President Dole of the Hawaiian Republic. "Off to America. - Sailing Day at Honolulu. -- American Congressional Party at a "Luau," Honolulu. INTRODUCTION. Kipling's Toast to the Native-Born-New Lands to be Ruled by American Law or Dominated by American Influence-Problems of Colonial Government to be Solved-The Philippines, Puerto Rico, Cuba and Hawaii, Each Its Own PuzzleAmerican Possessions Extending Half Way Around the World-The United States and the Eastern Question-Poverty of Information Available Concerning Our New Island Possessions-Opinions of the Secretary of Agriculture on the Importance of the Islands to American Farmers, Merchants and Mechanics. WT I charge you charge your glasses I charge you drink with me To the men of the Four New Nations, To the last least lump of coral That none may stand outside, And our own good pride shall teach us To praise our comrade's pride. -Rudyard Kipling. ITHIN the measure of a single year, there have come into the possession and under the sway of the United States of Amer ica, four splendid colonies. Two have been captured by force of American arms on land and sea; one has been aided to her own experiment in freedom with an assurance of American assistance, advice and dominance in the organization of her new life; one has come to us of her own free will, to join the western republic and obtain greater measure of prosperity, progress and security. So far as political relationships are concerned, all remain with an element of doubt. It is impossible to presage exactly the forms of gov ernment which wisdom may prescribe for Puerto Rico and Hawaii; it is impossible to know in advance the details of transfer of the Philippine islands from the power of Spain to the nation that is to inherit them; it is impossible to be assured what measure of peace, what outlines of government, and what American relationships are to be the immediate sequence of affairs in Cuba. The Philippines have been ARE TO BE cursed by Spanish influence since the day of MagelPROBLEMS THAT lan's discovery, and with their swarming millions of orientals present a problem not to be solved hastily. Concerning them intuition must wait upon logic and experience. We have found the islands in the midst of their own effort to throw off the yoke of Spanish oppression, and we have lifted the burden from their shoulders. Cuba comes to her freedom through centuries of oppression and misrule, the last three years, with all their horror and suffering, perhaps the happiest, because they were years during which patriots were fighting for the liberty of their own land. Hawaii comes under the banner of the stars and stripes, of her own motion, as the ultimate solution of her own island puzzle, a puzzle in which romance, commerce, history, tragedy and farce shared former years with restlessness and revolution leading to the republic. Puerto Rico, the only one of the four in which violence of late has been at rest, has suffered hardly less than her neighbor in the Antilles from the blight of Spanish dominion, and her people rejoice not less over the change in their station. "Our New Possessions." It is these things that justify to all alike the phrase, "Our New Possessions." Islands are no less in possession merely because political rule may not extend to them. If responsibility for the liberty, the peace, the commerce, the education of a people are not to imply a measure of possession without the additional link of political affiliation, the use of the expression will have to be revised. If we possess the commerce and the friendship of our neighbor islands it is enough to explain the word. To dominate in commercial influence and in all things for the uplifting of a swarming population of alien races, is a function as worthy and of more interest and consequence to most of our people, than the mere detail of official sway. The Philippines, Puerto Rico, Cuba and NO SUNSET ON SHORES. Hawaii, all by moral right and manifest destiny are the noble fruits of victory and the rising power of the great American commonwealth. From the eastern capes of Puerto Rico to the westernmost of the Philippines is half way 'round the world. When the sun is sinking in the western horizon, before the eyes of the American citizen of Manila, it will be dawning again in the east for the American citizen of Puerto Rico. Its rays will gild the hills of the Spanish islands of the Caribbean, flash over the hills of our own eastern states, the prairies of our middle west, the mountains of Colorado and of California, and without an intervening moment of darkness will pass on over Alaska, the Hawaiian islands, the extremest of the Aleutian chain and the Ladrone islands to that most eastern of all—or most western, according as one journeys around the world-to reach the Philippines. The sun will never set on American possessions. For good or ill, the United States has entered upon a colonial policy, a policy of expansion, a policy which forces us into the position of a world-power, deep in the complications of international politics and the Eastern Question. It is now too late to turn back. Once having reached this position, it is unnecessary to argue the importance of obtaining all the adequate knowledge available on the great questions involved. American citizens, with the welfare of their country at heart, are endeavoring to familiarize themselves with the details of conditions. in these new dominions and in the countries adjacent to them. Without experience or precedents of our own in a colonial policy, we are forced into the position of creating one, without time for experiment. We must learn while we govern and govern while we learn, and this too in close comparison with our neighbor nations in the Orient which have spent hundreds of years in the government of colonies and the methods of colonization. Great Britain, Germany, France, Russia, Holland, Portugal and Spain will be our European neighbors in the Orient; Great Britain and France in the West Indies. For intelligent development of our new possessions and in order to make of them the best lands possible for ourselves and for the millions who inhabit them, we must know of the sphere of commercial and political influence OUR NEW NEIGHBORS IN THE ORIENT. of each of these colonial powers and their relations with Japan, China, Korea, and the islands of the Orient in the Pacific, as wel' as with the Central and South American republics that border the Caribbean. The purpose of the accompanying volume is suggested in the foregoing outline of an evident need. It is such an obvious necessity to obtain and command the information on the subjects outlined, that the effort of justification is beyond question quite superfluous. But the subject itself is so ponderous and of such enormous consequence that it would be presumptuous for any author to cherish aspirations toward perfect success. The four books here included are but four books, and if there be found in them omissions of consequence, they must be charged to the material limitations of paper and covers rather than to the desire of the writer. So far as inadequacy of treatment within these limits is concerned, a generous judgment is hoped, the hope based on this same consciousness of the intention to afford accurate, compre hensive and entertaining information of an important and valuable sort within the limits here available. MEAGER INFOR- It is worth while, in the beginning, to call some attention to the exceeding poverty of information at present at command in printed form, concerning the subjects which are to be treated herein. First to mind come the Philippines, a group of islands the name of which was hardly known to Americans a THE SUBJECTS. year ago. Says one of the most recent writers, jocularly but pertinently, "By the victory of our fleet at Manila bay, one more of the world's side-tracked capitals has been pulled from obscurity into main lines of prominence, and the average citizen is no longer left, as in days gone by, to suppose that Manila is spelled with two l's and is floating around in the South Seas somewhere between Fiji and Patagonia. The Philippines have been discovered and the daily journals with their cheap maps have at last located Spain's Havana in the far east. It is indeed curious that a city of a third of a million people-capital of a group of islands as large as New England, New York, Delaware, Maryland, and New Jersey, which have long furnished the whole world with its entire supply of Manila hemp, which have exported some 160,000 tons of sugar in a single year and which to-day produce as excellent tobacco as that coming from the |