786 



SPAIN. 



Change of Ministers. In June Senor Sa- 

 gasta effected a reconciliation with the most pow- 

 erful of the Liberal dissentients and secured a 

 reliable majority for the further legislative meas- 

 ures that he contemplated bringing forward be- 

 fore the Cortes expired by limitation of time in 

 1892. The aristocratic and military elements 

 forming the court circle were unwilling that Sa- 

 gasta and the reunited Liberals should conduct 

 the approaching elections, and succeeded in im- 

 parting their distrust to the Queen-Regent, with 

 the result that the Cabinet resigned in a body. 

 In confiding the Government and the right of 

 presiding over the elections to the Conservatives, 

 Queen Christina followed the example of her 

 husband, who in the absence of a fair electoral 

 expression of the wishes of the people used his 

 prerogative to build up a constitutional Opposi- 

 tion and regular party government by calling 

 the chiefs of the parties alternately to office. 

 Senor Canovas del Castillo formed a Cabinet, 

 into which he called Admiral Berenger and two 

 other Advanced Liberals. It was constituted on 

 July 5 as follows : President of the Council, Ca- 

 novas del Castillo ; Minister of Foreign Affairs, 

 Duke de Tetuan : Minister of the Interior, Fran- 

 cisco Silvela ; Minister of Justice, Senor Villa- 

 verde ; Minister of War, Gen. Azcarraga ; Min- 

 ister of Marine, Admiral Berenger ; Minister of 

 Finance, Senor Cosgayon ; Minister of Colonies, 

 Senor Fabie ; Minister of Public Works, Senor 

 Isasa. The Chamber was dissolved by the new 

 ministry, and in the general election universal 

 suffrage did not alter the invariable course or 

 diminish the power of the Government to secure 

 an official majority. 



Labor Disturbances. Eight-hour demon- 

 strations on May 1, followed by strikes in vari- 

 ous parts of the country, brought into promi- 

 nence the labor question, to which little atten- 

 tion has been given since the formidable explo- 

 sion in 1873, although for ten years the Social- 

 ists and Anarchists have held regular conven- 

 tions in Madrid and the provincial capitals, as- 

 sociations and unions of working men have been 

 formed in every part of Spain, and their pro- 

 gramme has been advocated on tb 3 platform and 

 in their journals with tenacious consistency. 

 This embraces eight hours of labor for men; 

 prohibition of the labor of children under four- 

 teen and limitation of the working day to six 

 hours for young people under eighteen; inter- 

 diction of night work except in branches of in- 

 dustry requiring uninterrupted operations, and 

 in these the interdiction of night work for 

 women and minors ; thirty-six hours of continu- 

 ous rest every week ; interdiction of trades and 

 industrial methods harmful to health ; suppres- 

 sion of employers' stores and of payment in pro- 

 visions or goods ; suppression of employment 

 agencies ; vigilant state inspection of factories 

 and even of house industries by officials elected 

 in part by the working people/ At Bilboa and 

 throughout the mining and industrial districts 

 of the Nervion there was a general strike, and 

 collisions took place between the workmen and 

 the military. Riots took place also at Valencia 

 and Barcelona. In July the strikes in Catalonia 

 assumed serious proportions and threatened to 

 involve the whole industry of the province. The 

 struggle was not over wages or hours, but arose 



from a combination to compel employers to re- 

 engage discharged workmen. 



Industrial Conference. A conference for 

 the protection of industrial property that was 

 appointed to meet in Madrid in October, 1889, 

 and then postponed at the request of the Span- 

 ish Government till April 1, 1890, closed its la- 

 bors on April 14 with the signing of a protocol. 

 At the conference held at Rome in 1886 many 

 questions were left to be decided at the Madrid 

 meeting that were difficult of settlement on ac- 

 count of the conflicting interests of some of the 

 countries forming part of the International 

 Union. The most delicate of these was that of 

 false indications of the origin of merchandise. 

 Under the convention of 1883 the names and 

 trade-marks of individual makers were protected. 

 The Spanish Government and the International 

 Bureau of Bern proposed, on the basis of a draft 

 proposition offered by the British Government 

 at the Rome conference, to make importations 

 falsely marked as coming from a certain country 

 or locality liable to seizure. The French and 

 English representatives advocated a more strin- 

 gent penalty, while those of the United States, 

 Belgium, the Netherlands, and Italy withheld 

 their assent to the revision, which Great Britain, 

 France, Spain, Portugal, Sweden and Nprway, 

 Servia, Switzerland, Brazil, Guatemala, and Sal- 

 vador agreed to present for legislative enactment 

 to their respective legislative bodies. Germany,. 

 Austria, Russia, and Turkey remain outside the 

 arrangement, as they are not members of the 

 Union. In Great Britain the domestic manu- 

 facturers were already protected against the 

 competition of German and other manufacturers 

 using fraudulent British labels by the merchan- 

 dise marks act of 1887. The courts of each 

 country will have to decide whether the name of 

 a locality has become generic and is only used 

 to denote class or quality ; but on motion of the 

 French representative it was decided to except 

 wines from this provision and to prohibit the 

 use of the names of famous wine districts, such 

 as Champagne, Burgundy, Madeira, etc., for imi- 

 tations made in other places. Merchandise can 

 be seized either in the state where the false indi- 

 cation of origin is affixed or in that in which ar- 

 ticles bearing the false mark may be introduced. 

 If the laws of a state do not allow seizure, it 

 must be replaced by prohibition to import. A 

 vender may place his name and address on goods 

 from other countries, provided the country of 

 origin is also indicated in visible characters. An 

 exemption is made in favor of goods imported 

 for purposes of transit. This separate conven- 

 tion limited to the states ready to enter into 

 it, after the fashion of the restricted agreements 

 of the Postal Union, was the chief subject sub- 

 mitted to the Madrid conference. The confer- 

 ence adopted further a proposition to increase 

 from six months to one year the time allowed to 

 inventors for taking out a patent after first pre- 

 senting the application and a project for estab- 

 lishing at Rome an International Bureau for the 

 registration of trade-marks. 



The Colonies. Including the American col- 

 onies (see CUBA), the possessions of Spain beyond 

 the seas had a total area in 1890 of 433,891 

 square miles and a population of between 8,000,- 

 000 and 10,000,000. The population of the Phil- 



