Introduction: It is the story of a hundred years that we propose to give; the record of the noblest and most marvelous century in the annals of mankind.

After its long career of triumph and disaster, glory and shame, the world stands to-day at the end of an old and the beginning of a new century, looking forward with hope and backward with pride, for it has just completed the most wonderful hundred years it has ever known, and has laid a noble foundation for the twentieth century, now at its dawn.