THEIR OWN WORDS IN A COMPLETE SYSTEM OF HISTORY FOR ALL USES, EXTENDING TO ALL COUNTRIES AND SUBJECTS, AND REPRESENTING FOR BOTH READERS AND STUDENTS THE BETTER AND NEWER LITERATURE OF HISTORY IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE BY J. N. LARNED WITH NUMEROUS HISTORICAL MAPS FROM ORIGINAL STUDIES AND DRAWINGS BY ALAN O. REILEY REVISED AND ENLARGED EDITION IN SIX VOLUMES VOLUME VI—RECENT HISTORY 1894-5 TO 1901 A to Z SPRINGFIELD, MASS. THE C. A. NICHOLS CO., PUBLISHERS COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY J. N. LARNED. The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, U. S. A. Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company. PREFACE TO THE SIXTH VOLUME. The six years that have passed since the original five volumes of this compilation were published, in 1894-5, have been filled with events so remarkable and changes so revolutionary in political and social conditions that the work has seemed to need an extension to cover them. The wish for such an extension, expressed by many people, led to the preparation of a new volume, in which all the lines of the historical record are taken from the points at which they were dropped in the early volumes, and are carried to the end of the Nineteenth Century, and beyond it, into the opening months of the present year. In plan and arrangement this additional volume is uniform with the preceding ones; but the material used in it is different from that dealt with before, and a quite different character is given consequently to the book. The former compilation represented closet-studies of History—perspective views of a past more or less remote from those who depicted it. This one, on the contrary, exhibits History in the making,—the day by day evolution of events and changes as they passed under the hands and before the eyes and were recorded by the pens of the actual makers and witnesses of them. If there is crudeness in the story thus constructed, there is life in it, to quite make good the lack of literary finish; and the volume is expected to prove as interesting and as useful as its predecessors. It sets forth, with the fulness which their present-day interest demands, all the circumstances that led to the Spanish-American war; the unforeseen sequences of that war, in the Philippine Islands, in Cuba, in Porto Rico, and in American politics; the whole controversy of Great Britain with the South African Boers and the resulting war; the shameful dealings of western nations with China, during late years, which provoked the outbreak of barbaric hostility to foreigners, and the dreadful experiences of the siege and relief of Peking; the strange Dreyfus agitations in France; the threatening race-conflicts in Austria; the change of sovereign in England; the Peace Conference at The Hague and