At the beginning of the year 1898 Spain’s colonial possessions in America comprised Cuba and Puerto Rico, the former with an area of about 45,000 square miles, and a population then estimated at 1,600,000; the latter, about 3,600 square miles in area, and with 813,000 inhabitants. In Asia, the Philippine Islands, about 2,000 in number, 114,300 square miles in area, and with a population of about 8,000,000; the Carolines and Palaos, 560 square miles in area, and 36,000 population; the Sulu Islands, 950 square miles, and 75,000 inhabitants; and the Marianne or Ladrone Islands, 420 square miles in area, and with 10,000 population—a total of 164,830 square miles, and 10,521,000 people. In Africa and off its west coast, several small colonies, aggregating 3,650 miles in area, and 461,000 population. A grand total in America, Asia, and Africa of about 168,480 square miles, and 10,982,000 population. Thus, notwithstanding her enormous losses in the past, Spain still held foreign possessions, at the opening of 1898, with an aggregate area nearly seven–eighths that of the mother country, and a population more than half as large. Three centuries and more ago Spain swayed the world, the possessions pertaining to her great empire being vaster than those to–day controlled by Great Britain. Her losses began near the close of the sixteenth century, under Philip II, when her North African provinces slipped away; under Philip III she lost Naples, Sicily, and Burgundy; early in the seventeenth century she lost the Netherlands; a little later, the rich Spice Islands of the East; in 1640, Portugal; in 1659, the Pyrenean provinces of France; in 1704 Gibraltar fell into British hands, and has been retained by Britain ever since; in 1800 Louisiana was ceded to France, and that vast territory was forever lost when it was sold by Bonaparte to the United States in 1803. The first quarter of the nineteenth century saw the severance from Spain of all her South American colonies, Central America, Mexico, and the Floridas; the year before its close she lost her last remaining islands in the West Indies—Cuba and Puerto Rico; and in Asia, the Philippines and the Sulus.