[Inclosure in No. 147.]
Señor Gullon to
Mr. Woodford.
Ministry of
State,
Palace, February 15,
1898.
No. 13.]
Excellency:
My Dear Sir: There is, in fact, as your
excellency yourself suspects, an error or misunderstanding, little
surprising, in truth, in the references to our brief conversation of
Thursday, the 10th instant, to which your excellency alludes in the
note which I had the honor to receive yesterday.
After your excellency read to me the telegram transmitted by your
Government, and an exact copy of which you were kind enough to leave
with me, when you asked me to indicate to you the opinions and
intentions of the cabinet of Madrid concerning the facts mentioned
in the same dispatch I replied solely that the Spanish Government,
like that of Washington, and like your excellency, with entire
sincerity lamented the incident which was the cause of our
interview; but that, while considering it and measuring its real
significance, Señor Dupuy de Lome had already solved it by
presenting the resignation of his charge, which the council of
ministers had just accepted.
To this clear declaration I understood that I should limit my reply,
because, in fact, the Spanish ministry, in accepting the resignation
of a functionary whose services they had been utilizing and valuing
up to that time, left it perfectly well established that they did
not share, and rather, on the contrary, disauthorized, the
criticisms tending to offend or censure the chief of a friendly
State, although such criticisms had been written within the field of
personal friendship, and had reached publicity by artful and
criminal means.
This meaning which was involved and could not help being embodied in
a resolution of the council of ministers adopted before I had the
pleasure of receiving your excellency when the Government of Spain
only in a general way, by vague telegraphic reports, learned the
sentiments alluded to, is naturally the real meaning which the
Spanish ministry, with equal or greater reason, gives to the
decision referred to, after reading the words which your excellency
copies in Spanish in the first of the two paragraphs which your
courteous note transmits to me.
As regards the second paragraph which the same communication of your
excellency almost literally reproduces, the Government of which I
form a part is profoundly surprised that a private letter, dated, as
it appears, on a day relatively [Page 1016] distant, and the opinions of which can not
properly be formed now, subsequent to recent agreements, can be
invoked now merely on account of the significance of the signature
as a germ of suspicion and doubts as opposed to the unanswerable
testimony of simultaneous and subsequent facts.
The present Spanish Government, before and after the date indicated,
with respect to the new colonial regimen and the projected treaty of
commerce gave such evident proofs of its real designs and of its
innermost convictions that it does not now consider compatible with
its prestige to lay stress upon or to demonstrate anew the truth and
sincerity of its purposes and the unstained good faith of its
intentions.
Publicly and solemnly it contracted, before the metropolis and its
colonies, the responsibility of the political and tariff changes
which it has inaugurated in both Antilles, and the natural ends of
which in the domestic and international spheres it pursues with that
perseverance and that firmness to which from the beginning, it
adjusted and which in the future must inspire its entire
conduct.
I take advantage, etc.,
