The current Government will leave a name in history for its political reforms and for its fortune in preserving public peace; but it will also leave one for its detestable administration and for the neglect in which it holds the moral and material interests of the country. A trail so deep must be left by its passage through power that it will require successors of great will, much time, and no little fortune to erase it.
The anarchy that reigns in the popular corporations; the neglect existing in the provincial governments; the embezzlements that occur in the public works offices; the insatiable avarice that dominates the local political bosses; the constant irritations kept for the consumers; the lack of a discernible relief action to carry out railway traffic, to moralize the collection of the consumption tax, to purify the atmosphere of the customs houses, to delimit, affirm, and protect legitimately acquired rights—both of the miners as well as the industrialists and the farmers—without the presence of crude hostilities, which are nothing more than infamous exploitations; the indolence and neglect observed in the waste that ruins us; all, all of this will bring most disastrous consequences for moral tranquility, for the development of public interests, for the nation’s credit, and even for the consolidation of liberty.
We are not going to provide a history of the errors, absurdities, violences, and blunders committed in all spheres of our administration; for that would be a long and tedious task, all the more so since we devote ourselves to it daily, albeit with less success than fortune; but we are going to say something new, as proof of the preceding statements, regarding a matter we have treated several times from the columns of El Globo, as it is of capital importance, not only for our wealth and our credit, but also because we consider it a most powerful precedent for regularizing your administrative procedures; we refer to the now celebrated and almost vexatious dossier of the Huelva mines.
Without the necessary study and without the proper calm, the decree suppressing the calcinations of copper ore was issued. It was natural—it was what was considered injured by its provisions—that legal appeals were lodged against it, believed, no doubt, that in this country, as in all others, such appeals are attended to and resolved, if not within legal timeframes, then within prudent ones. Two years of proceedings, reports, precedents, and formalities of every kind have passed, and still the blessed dossier is seemingly yet to be resolved; days, weeks, and months pass, and the resolution is not issued.
Why? We know not; but thinking with the impartiality we have never abandoned, we suppose that the only causes that can determine this fact are the fear that the Government might be confused with certain men by acknowledging the error into which they may have fallen; or perhaps abandonment or pride, which does not wish to employ its time when dealing with two rights or interests of others.
And that this occurs in the present case is quite evident.
The press that has concerned itself with this matter, in reporting on the journeys that scientific, impartial, and serious men have recently made to the mines of the province of Huelva, has somewhat clarified the mystery surrounding this subject. Reports sought regarding the fumes have not been found; statistics consulted do not show an increase in deaths in relation to the increase in calcined mineral; the statistics of the populations believed to be most prejudiced, when consulted, result in a considerable growth of inhabitants; when the iron of the grilles and balconies was examined, no indication appeared that this metal is attacked by sulfurous gas, as was said; when the air was analyzed, no deleterious substance was found in it; when the most energetic anti-smoke advocates were questioned, they declared that the damage they do not feel is greater in the fields of others than in their own. Are such reports biased? Is there passion in these statements? We suppose not; because apart from the personal consideration deserved by all who make them, we do not believe that men of science, reputed for their knowledge and their history, would compromise their reputation and fame in passionate reports on a matter in which they have neither interests nor affections.
But here is what deserves study; something the government does not yet know.
That the fumes from the calcinations cause some harm is beyond doubt; those damages are suffered by agriculture. We have always said that, if public health were seriously threatened in the towns near the mines, the administration has not only the right, but the duty to prevent the harm, without forgetting that mining works are carried out by virtue of a sacred contract entered into by the Government, and that if the harm were of another nature, the consequent indemnities should be given or the expropriation of the prejudiced lands or plants should be sought; this is what is rational, just, legal, and convenient. It now turns out that science, the only one that can speak on this matter, comes to say that health suffers nothing, and to correct the errors that may have been committed through flippancy or whatever else, and to measure the damages felt by property, in order to indemnify or expropriate it.
It may happen that, in doing this, the interest of one party appears, hiding the truth, exaggerating the intensity of the evil, or distorting the facts; in this case, the law and the courts are charged with settling the disputes and ensuring that each has their own. What cannot be allowed, what the administration must avoid at all costs, is that elements be prepared and piled up so that egoism and avarice do not present the truth disfigured, and that the skill, intensity, or favor of some does not prejudice the interests of others. And we much fear that something of this is being attempted by someone; such is the insistence on presenting this matter as complicated, dangerous, and difficult, when it is so simple, so clear, and so ordinary.
Let the government not forget what we have said repeatedly regarding the dangers involved in its conduct in what is called “the matter of the fumes.” If on other occasions the prejudices and damages caused by the pyrites are such that they cannot be cured, they remain limited to the one who feels them; the misfortune of living under an administration as anarchic and disturbing as ours is suffered in its wealth, its credit, and its interests.
Perhaps we shall achieve nothing with our warnings, but we make them out of a duty of loyalty to those responsible for the evils that this conduct entails, and to say that, through indolence, we gather the inheritance of our efforts. (From El Globo.)
Association for the defense of commercial, industrial, worker, and urban property interests, prejudiced by the suppression of calcinations.
Local Boards.
VILLAGE OF LAS DELGADAS. In the village of Las Delgadas on the twentieth of February, eighteen hundred and ninety, the individual farmers who compose the Committee in defense of mining interests and their derivatives met and saw fit to appoint as representative of said Committee, with the widest powers to represent them in all cases convenient to the indicated matter, the proprietor of the same village and primary instruction teacher, Mr. Juan de Dios Modesto Matias García.
And so that it may be recorded where appropriate, they sign the present minutes in Las Delgadas on February 20, 1890. President, Mr. Modesto M. García.—Vice-president, Mr. Juan G. García García.—Members, Mr. Juan Romero, Mr. Manuel Becerra, Mr. Juan Romero, Mr. Manuel Ramirez, Mr. Marcos Rodriguez, and Mr. Juan Delgado Ruiz.—Secretary Member, Mr. José Lopez García.
“EL SIGLO MEDICO” The calcinations of Huelva.
I PRELIMINARIES The unhealthful action of the fumes produced by the open-air calcinations of copper pyrites in the province of Huelva has come to be a point of importance in the study and resolutions of this grave litigation, which preoccupies the Spanish Government, the majority of the towns of the province of Huelva, the mining companies, the Press, and the entire Country. The economic question, the agricultural question, the legal question, the social question… are different aspects of this great problem that governments can appreciate with sufficient clarity to resolve them in accordance with justice and convenience; but there is a profound problem, according to how it affects industry and agriculture. But there is another factor more difficult to estimate at first sight, more interesting and even more imperious than the previous ones, and also less apt to be resolved from a distance and within the solitude and rest of the office; a factor in whose name reports have been issued, counsel has been formulated, and transcendental governmental resolutions have been imposed, without all of this having been preceded by that perfect knowledge of the subject that such a grave matter required; and of this factor, namely the influence of those fumes on the insalubrity of the towns, we are going to treat after having appreciated on the ground the truth of the facts in the territory of the mines, with that single concept that ill-formulated questions and poorly handled issues—given the elements of illustration—had caused to form, even within the Academy of Medicine when discussing theoretically and within the spheres of doctrine, what can only be well known and judged by visiting the mines and towns.
Called to intervene in this matter by reason of their technical competence, the Royal Academy of Medicine and the Royal Council of Health found themselves obliged both to report; the second doing so according to figures, expositions, and studies that were already beginning to raise doubts and vices of partiality in their origin; and the first according to the questions that were formulated by the Council of State, after having been inspired by the reading of the conclusions of the Royal Council of Health.
In order for everything to be anomalous and conducted along stray paths in said business, that which should have gone first to the Royal Academy so that it, in accordance with its powers, might have illustrated the fundamental point of the question—to wit, whether the fumes produced by the calcinations of the teleras were or were not harmful to health—was instead requested from the Royal Council of Health so that it might report on points that it could not, in reality, have appreciated and estimated with that high scientific sense and that mandatory competence that the matter required.
In the opinion issued by the Council of State concerning the royal decree of February 29, 1888, suppressing open-air calcinations, it is stated very clearly that the foundations of the opinion of the Royal Council of Health regarding the insalubrity of the fumes were confused for said consultative Body.
The Council of State says: “The Council of Health contains an affirmation of fact, not absolute, but circumstantial, to wit: the system of open-air calcinations is prejudicial to public health, according to the procedure today employed in Rio-Tinto, and a deduction which is a consequence of that fact, considering this industrial procedure as unhealthful.” The conclusion of the Council of Health is, therefore, that if the “current proportions” subsist, in its opinion there is insalubrity; but it does not affirm that insalubrity subsists in smaller proportions.
DR. A. PULIDO.
(As published in La Provincia)
