Jasper County Democrat, Volume 1, Number 28, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 October 1898 — IN A SULPHUR MINE. [ARTICLE]

IN A SULPHUR MINE.

Terrible Hardships of the Bogs Employer! therein. “There are but few who admire the. collection of beautiful Sulphur crystals in the National Museum,” remarked the gentleman who collected them from the famed sulphur mines in Sicily to a Washington Star reporter, “who have anyAdea in relation to the same except their beauty. I don’t think,” he said, “there Is another spot on earth where such abominable treatment, such fiendish cruelty, is Inflicted the laborer as in the sulphur mines of Sicily. They are paid barely enough to provide themselves with a scant supply of the coarest, cheapest food, and a good portion of the time they are in a state of chronic starvation. When I was last there, many of the mines were closed, and a Sicilian paper stated that 30.000 people were starving at the mines. The work is of the hardest and most exhausting character. Very few of" The mines have hoisting apparatus, and the sulphur ore (sulphur and limestone combined) is brought up from the depths below on the backs of men and boys. Long, sloping, narrow tunnels lead from the surface down to the sulphur beds 200 to 000 feet or more lielow. Miners dig the stuff out, and it is carried up in stout sacks or flat baskets. Many of the laborers, especially the boys, work naked. On their backs they wear a piece of matting, or something of the sort, held by a string around the neck. This is to protect the flesh from being torn from their bodies by the jagged corners of the ore they carry. No one can imagine a more heartrending sight than to see the wretched creatures toiling up the long, steep slopes in the mine with their enormous loads. Every step, they take wrings a groan from their tortured frames. Most pitiful to me was the sight of the poor, bent, broken and emaciated old men, mere battered wrecks, and the young lads of 10 and 12 years, who have just begun this life of cruel toil. “Staggering along under loads full as heavy as a strong man ought to carry, the dreadful procession winds upward through the narrow drifts and tunnels to the surface, where the ore is piled up in rectangular heaps and paid for by the cubic meter. “An evidence of the awful severity of the labor is the fact that a very large percentage of these lads are so badly crippled by the time’they reach the age for military service that the conscript officers are forced to reject them. And I assure you that the Italian Government is not over-critical as to the physical condition of the men she sends by the ship load to Massowah to be butchered by the Abyssinians. When the miserable creatures leave the inferno underground and reach the surface they find themselves in a veritable corner of hades. The sulphur is extracted at the mine by roasting it in immense heaps slightly covered with earth, not unlike in form to a charcoal pit. The ajr Is so Ailed with sulphurous vapors and dust as to almost suffocate one. Not a green thing in sight, for the poisonous vapors kill all vegetation. The fierce sun beats down upon one in those vendureless valleys with great fury. On every side there are the hot rocks, acres of Impalpable stifling dust, and the vapors from the calcining air can only be compared to blasts from the infernal raffion.” Prof. Martin, the Swedish savant, has discovered in the Kremlin at Moscow a large portion of the Swedish War booty captured by Gustavus Adolphus. It appears that the majority of the sliver vessels and ornaments kept in the treasury at the Kremlin are present* made at different times by varioui kings of Sweden to the czars of Russia