It may be necessary for a clear view of the subject in hand to review briefly the causes which have led to this unhappy end; but, happily, a work dealing with the rehabilitation or industrial reconstruction of Cuba does not require the author either to dwell long upon nor to emphasise the gloomy side of the picture. The results of Spanish robbery and misrule speak too plainly. The reader has seen what Cuba might have been under an honest, stable government, or under the protecting ægis of the United States. The picture presented is not exaggerated, but is coloured by a moderate brush. What Cuba is, alas! is too well known to American and English readers to call for more than a brief summary of conditions as they existed when the author was requested by the President of the United States to visit the Island, report upon its industrial condition, and suggest plans for the relief of the population and for the commercial and industrial reconstruction of the country. Visiting the Island immediately after the signing of the protocol of the cessation of hostilities between the United States and Spain, August 12, 1898, and again returning to Santiago in December after that province had been in charge of the United States military authorities for nearly six months, he had ample and satisfactory opportunity for the study of conditions and future needs of the people. Surely the horrors and the desolating hand of war were never laid more heavily upon a once prosperous country. Nearly a third of the population wiped out by battle, wholesale slaughter, starvation, exposure, or disease, and a large proportion of those left enfeebled by deprivation and too weak to take up their occupations; the cane-fields and tobacco plantations, which formed the basis of prosperity, burned, and whole sections of country swept of every vestige of civilisation; sugar-centrals, houses, and structures of all kinds destroyed, and inhabitants either dead or huddled half starved in miserable huts near the towns and cities; not a living creature to be seen where once browsed innumerable cattle, and death, destruction, and desolation spread throughout this land that should, and under ordinary circumstances would, be as full of life and prosperity as the richest agricultural section of our own country.