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mines up in the Dutch part were open cut. In the open cut mines they didn't have anything like the amount of silica breakdowns, due of course to the fact that they had a larger amount of fresh air to breathe and didn't have such concentrated breathing of silica.

We began exploring the situation. It was just utterly hopeless to get any manufacturer support for covering silicosis under the law. We agitated that for years. The Governor made speeches about silicosis. We wrote up cases. We tried to get up an interest in it.

Up to that time we had been adding a disease as we found it to the list of diseases. Then we began proposing general coverage of all occupational diseases. The objection to that became very strong because the Associated Industries and others thought that that would mean that it would cover silicosis. They were determined not to have silicosis covered in the State of New York.

We didn't give up the idea of having silicosis covered, but then we had to prevent it, since we couldn't cope with it in any other way. There was no technique for that. Certain people who dealt with silicosis, a great many of the union men included, believed that if they would but wet the stuff down, you wouldn't get silicosis. Because you don't see the dust fly when it's wet, they thought that it wasn't there.