The better class of people on the islands knew that the lottery and opium eating would ruin the Hawaiians, and, led by Sanford B. Dole, an American born in the islands, they rebelled. The queen was made to sign a paper whereby she gave up her throne, but she added that the Americans had forced her to do so, and that the United States should judge whether they had a right to turn her out of her kingdom or not.

Dole and several other men on the island immediately set up a provisional government (1893), and sent men to Washington to offer the rich Hawaiian Islands as a free gift to our great republic. The Hawaiian question came up at Washington about a month before Harrison was to make room for Cleveland, and as everybody knew that the first of these gentlemen was for, and the latter against, the annexation of the islands, it became largely a question of time.

An attempt was made to rush a treaty through the Senate before the 4th of March. It failed, however, and Cleveland’s first action was to withdraw the treaty and send a man to Hawaii to find out the wishes of the natives, because Liliuokalani insisted that they did not want to be annexed, and that she would never have been deposed had it not been for the American settlers and the United States marines. The latter had been sent ashore to protect the lives and property of Americans during the revolution, but the queen declared they had helped the rebels to dethrone her.

Now, it is very hard to find out the exact truth about such things, and many people have stated that the man sent out to Hawaii by Cleveland heard only one side of the story. However that may be, the President, upon receiving his report, felt sure that the Americans alone were to blame for all the trouble which had occurred.

When a person or a nation has done anything wrong, the only honorable course is to apologize and try to undo the harm done. Cleveland therefore sent a man out there, with orders to help the queen recover her lost power. This American minister, however, found out that it could not be done without bloodshed, and that Liliuokalani meant to have some of the men who had taken part in the revolution put to death, and to take their property. He therefore wrote to Washington for further orders, and the President promptly answered that he would not compel the people to receive the queen if they did not want her, and that lie would not uphold a woman who was not ready to show a generous and forgiving spirit. Liliuokalani thus lost his support, and, as the provisional government refused to yield to the queen, she had to withdraw to her private house, while the Hawaiians in power, seeing no chance of immediate annexation, set up a republic, with Dole as President.

Secretly helped by a few Englishmen, the Louisiana Lottery, and the opium sellers, Liliuokalani’s friends now began to plot to overthrow the republic, and, it is said, they made arrangements to blow up the President and his Cabinet while they were at church.

We are told that this plot was discovered almost at the last minute by a man who stepped into the church and spoke a few words in President Dole’s ear. The latter rose from his seat, after whispering in his turn to the men near him, who softly passed the message on. A few minutes later only the women and children were left in the building, but they too rushed out when they heard soldiers marching in the street.

Liliuokalani’s friends and troops were promptly surrounded, and after a few men had been killed the rest surrendered. The queen was arrested, her stores of arms and explosives seized, and the uprising of 1895 was at an end. Fearing that the islands would not be able to resist an attack from the British or the Japanese (who both seemed inclined to pounce upon them), the Hawaiians again asked to be annexed by the United States. They had proved so quiet and orderly under a republican government that the proposal was accepted, and the stars and stripes now float over all the Hawaiian Islands, where until 1898 we owned only the right to a coaling station.

It is said that the Spanish–American War cost us about two hundred million dollars and three thousand lives, while it cost Spain nearly five times as much. Besides adding to our territory, the war put an end to all jealousy between the North and the South, for old Union and Confederate soldiers, and their sons, now fought side by side under the same flag.

Many of the inhabitants of the islands won from Spain are supposed to be in favor of annexation to the United States. But whether they will adapt themselves to our rule, and become good American citizens, time alone can tell.

Since August 12, 1898, the Hawaiian Islands have belonged to the United States of America.

They are a group of eight large and a few small islands in the Pacific Ocean, about two thousand miles from San Francisco.

We know very little about the early history of these islands, which were already inhabited by the gentle Kanakas when the Spaniards visited them in the sixteenth century. About two hundred years later, in 1778, Captain Cook, an English navigator, landed there, naming the whole group Sandwich Islands in honor of the Earl of Sandwich. The natives, however, went on calling them the Hawaiian Islands, after Hawaii, the largest of the group, and it is by this name that they are best known.

The natives worshiped Captain Cook as a god, and treated him so well that he went back there the following winter. But this time the Hawaiians were not so glad to see him, for his men had behaved very badly during their first sojourn. While repairing his ships, Captain Cook missed some tools, and knowing they had been stolen by the natives, he tried to seize one of their chiefs and hold him a prisoner until his property was returned. In the midst of the fight which this attempt stirred up, Captain Cook was separated from his men, who escaped when they saw he had been killed. He was buried on the island, where a monument has been erected over his remains.

In 1868 our minister Burlingame had made a trade treaty with China, but when Hayes became President, Congress passed a bill to prevent the Chinese from coming over here. Hayes vetoed this bill and in 1878 received the first real Chinese embassy in the White House. There, their jewels, gorgeous costumes of finest silk, and gay peacock feathers caused a great sensation.

The most important event during Hayes’s term was that the government said it was ready to pay gold in exchange for every “greenback” issued during the war. But now that the people knew they could get gold in exchange for the paper money whenever they wanted it, they decided to keep on using bills, because they are so much easier to carry than coin. At the same time, Congress passed a Silver Bill, providing that the government should buy and coin a certain amount of silver every month, using sixteen times as much silver in a silver dollar as of gold in a gold dollar.

Before Hayes’s term ended, a dispute about fisheries between Canada and the United States was settled in a friendly way, by our paying Great Britain five and a half millions for the right to fish along the Canadian coast.

The principal chiefs were Sitting Bull and Rain–in–the–Face, who refused to stir. They were then told that they must obey or the troops would force them to do so. But the Indians retreated into the Big Horn valley, where they got ready to fight.

General George A. Custer, who had fought bravely all through the Civil War, set out in June, 1876, to attack them. But he divided his force, so as to strike them from two sides at once, and when he and his two hundred and sixty–two men came suddenly upon the Indians’ camp he found that the Sioux had been joined by many others of their tribe, and now, instead of a few hundred, were five thousand strong!

In a moment Custer’s cavalrymen saw they could not escape. Nevertheless, they dismounted calmly, resolved to die bravely at their post. The Indians came on, twenty to one, and stampeded the cavalry horses by fiendish yells and wildly waving blankets. Left thus, with nothing but the ammunition in their cartridge belts, Custer and his brave troopers fought until their last shots had been fired, and when the battle was over, every one of them lay there dead, but surrounded by many slain Indians.

Aboard of distinguished men, therefore, met at Geneva, in Switzerland, to settle what are known as the “Alabama claims.” You remember that during the Civil War a vessel of that name and other ships were built in England,—a neutral country,—and handed over to the Confederates, who used them to destroy many Union vessels.

After weighing both sides, of the question, this board decided that a neutral country should not furnish vessels and arms to nations at war. As Great Britain had clearly been in the wrong in this case, she was condemned to pay the United States fifteen and a half million dollars as damages for property destroyed.

The second question—the water boundary between the United States and British Columbia in Puget Sound—was left entirely to the Emperor of Germany, who drew the line on the map where it now stands.

Besides, Fillmore soon saw that it would be a fine thing if the Americans living in California could trade with Japan. In those days, however, the Emperor of Japan feared strangers and would not allow any foreign vessels to come into his ports, except a few–Dutch ships. Hoping to make him change his mind, and to get him to sign a treaty which would open his ports for American trade, President Fillmore sent him a letter ‘and several presents, among which were mechanical inventions’ which had never been seen in Japan before.

As there was then no postal–service between the United States and Japan, this letter was given to Commodore Perry, the brother of the hero of Lake Erie. Although told to be very friendly with the Japanese, he was sent out with seven war ships, so that he could hold his own if at tacked. Perry delivered his letter, and after long delays finally got the Emperor of Japan to make a trade treaty with the United States.

Frémont had also explored a vast tract of land in northern Mexico, which the United States wished to own. So, when the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, in 1848, it was agreed that Mexico should give up all claim to Texas as far south as the Rio Grande, and also to New Mexico and what was then called Upper California,—including all the land between the Gila River and the parallel of 42°,—in exchange for fifteen million dollars.

There was, however, soon after this some slight trouble about the boundary, so James Gadsden was sent to sign a new treaty. He bought for the United States another strip of land, south of the Gila River, for ten million dollars (1853). Because he did this, and signed the treaty, that strip of land is known as the “Gadsden Purchase.”

Although the British made sundry attempts to stop them, they were followed by so many others that, three years after Whitman’s famous ride, no less than twelve thousand Americans had passed into Oregon. Our countrymen thus proved so much more numerous than the English that they soon claimed the whole territory, asking that the boundary be drawn at the parallel of 54” 40’. The British, however, did not wish to give up so much land. So, before long, a quarrel arose, and the Americans began to cry that they would fight Great Britain unless it consented to what they wished. Many people justly considered that this was a very foolish way of acting, and Webster made one of his fine speeches to show both parties that it would be wiser to settle the dispute in another way. After a great deal of talk, and many threats about “fifty–four forty or fight,” the United States finally thought best to accept the 49th parallel as its northern boundary from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean (1846).

This might have made trouble, for the United States was just then trying to agree with Great Britain about our frontiers. Still, the work went smoothly on, until part of the northern boundary of the United States (that is, of the Louisiana purchase) was fixed as the 49th parallel of latitude, from the Lake of the Woods to the top of the Rocky Mountains. It was also decided that the Oregon country, then a large tract of wild woodland reaching from these mountains to the Pacific, should be jointly occupied by Americans and British for the next ten years.

The following year, the United States made a treaty with Spain, which, for the sum of five millions, sold us East and West Florida (1819). Then our eastern seacoast extended from the St. Croix River, in Maine, all along the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico to the Sabine River. The same treaty decided that the boundary between Mexico and our country should be formed by parts of the Sabine, Red, and Arkansas rivers, and the 42nd parallel to the Pacific Ocean.

Spain was very glad to secure five million dollars just then, because the South American colonies had revolted and ceased to supply her with funds. Some of the principal European kings were so afraid that their states would soon follow the example of South America and set up republics too, that they made an agreement to help each other, and even to force the South American republics to submit again to Spain.

When Monroe heard of this agreement, or Holy Alliance, he said that, while the United States did not mean to meddle in European quarrels, we should no longer allow any European power to meddle in American affairs. The American continent was for Americans only, and no part of it could ever be seized by any one else.

When the Holy Alliance heard of this statement, which is known in our history as the “Monroe Doctrine” (1823), it no longer dared carry out its plans; for Great Britain sided with us against it. The Emperor of Russia, who had been trying to secure more land along the Pacific coast, felt so sure that the Monroe Doctrine would be upheld, that he consented to sign a treaty, whereby he promised never to claim anything on this continent but Alaska, or Russian America, as it was then called.

The news of the treaty of Ghent (1814) reached Washington just nine days after the tidings of the victory at New Orleans. Although no mention was made of boarding ships, seizing sailors, or exciting the Indians, the war and treaty put an end to most of those things.