Un barcelonés nuevayorquino sobre ve la Semana Trágica como un conflicto regionalista

APOLOGY FOR BARCELONA.
Interested In Industry, the People Object to Fighting.

To the Editor of The New York Times:

I notice your dispatches of to-day in regard to the Spanish situation that the disturbances in Barcelona and other Spanish Eastern points are classed as mainly the work of Anarchists and Socialists. Perhaps you have noticed that any time there are disturbances in Catalonia they are attributed to that class of agitators. While there have been occurrences to justify that idea, the facts in the present instance are simply the result of gross injustice prevailing in the conditions in which the army is forced to go about to patch trouble and correct blunders and wrongdoing on the part of high officials, as is the case with the present war in Morocco.

I was born in Barcelona and lived there long enough to realize some of these things. The men who are sent to the front are ignorant of the reasons why they have to risk their lives, in most cases, and the only information that leaks out is of the kind that shows that they are being made a sacri?ce of on account of bureaucratic wrongdoing. Catalonia has been the land of protest for many years in Spanish history, and the reason of it is that industrial development and commercialism have given that section of Spain the opportunity to feel the benefits of peace instead of war. For years previous to the Cuban rebellion they asked the Government to grant the Cubans autonomy, to keep Cuba for Spain, and retain a valuable market. They protested often when their sons were forced to go to Cuba to shoot down Cubans for wanting what the Catalonians themselves had long advocated.

Through their prosperity, attained in spite of an antagonistic Government, education has been much more general there than in other portions of Spain, due to an extensive private school system throughout the province. Because of their advancement over the rest of Spain, Catalonians have been mockingly called the «Yankees» of Spain. People who love work and prosper thereby, must necessarily resent the idea of being packed away to fight for unknown reasons, many miles away from their homes. Americans can readily see what that means if methods of raising an army are compared. Here men are called to give their services voluntarily, which they freely offer after they know what the trouble is about. The spirit or unrest in Catalonia and other portions of Spain is the natural result of gross injustice, and it will eventually lead to wholesale insurrection on the part of the army, and probably be the means‘ of eventually putting the war business out of all over Europe. Fighting for the flag is getting to be a delusion where the Government is not the people’s own, and the drift is clear.

HENRY DALMASES.

Schenectady, July 29. 1909.