The Sun.
London, England, 1844-08-02 00:00:00

u~

RIOS IN BOEMIA.
The spirit of dTiscontent and H
of riot which, as des.
cribed .by us a fortnight ago, had -already flown like
wildfire from Silesia to Prague, has since spread
and raged destructively. Scarcely' were the outrages
of the cotton-spineers and printers of Prague re-
pressed by the soldiery, when the workinee on the
railroad near the. city caught the infection.---This is
the statemeut from Prague itself:—"Towards the
evening of the Bth of this month, from 6,000 to 7,000
workmen on the railroad, who were also dissatisfied
with their wages, collected tumultuously. They at-
tempted to penetrate into the city by the Spital-gate,
but, as was to be expected in the present temper of
the lower classes, they found it closed. The military
Who were dispatched against the lawless crowds
were received with showers of stones, which wounded
Many of the soldiers, and the excited grenadiers, it is
said without having received any command, fired on
mob. A not inconsiderable number (no- number is
given) were killed and wounded, many innocent
people amongst them, whom curiosity or chance
had led to the scene of combat ; and in particular
a little child which sate on a table in the back
room of the ground floor of a house in the Karolin-
enthal. The military closed all approaches to the
gate, and kept their ground till late in the night,
when the mob dispersed; In the meantime, in the
city, another concourse of the worst classes of the
populace had run together, and traversed the city in
various directions with loud outcries, and dashed in
windows and knocked to pieces the booths in the
Jews' market. A great number of these depredators
were seized and flogged, but again the following day
they assembled in great masses, and cooled their
wrath by the destruction of some thousands of
window-panes. •
Bloody as was the' result of this outbreak, the de-
struction of property was nothing to that' which had
taken place on the &l in the neighbonrhood of Rei-
chenberg, the great manufacturing district of Bohe-
mia. In the morning of that day a strong troop of
the workmen collected at Katharinaberg, on the black
Niesse, three miles north-east of Reichenberg, before
the farthest factory on the Niesse, and commanded
the workmen there to join them in destroying the
new spinning machinery by which so many people
were become destitute of bread. The troop -thus
swelled advanced now down the Niesse from one fac-
tory to another. All the hands were compelled to
join them. As in the factories on the Upper Niesse
there were . found no new but nierely the old sort of
machines, the mob passed quickly on, without doing
the.- slightest injury to buildings or machinery.
When the'tliron& arrived at • the factory a Ilers
Stephen Konig, an Ilabendorf, it had swollen to
some hundreds of men. Here were first found
some of the new machines (bread-thief machines,
as they call them). These were not yet fully
erected. They dragged them into the meadow, and
in a moment they were a mass of ruin. Hence the
throng betook itself through Machendorf, where a
machine was destroyed in the factory of the
bleacher Herr Ohnesorgen, to Hammerstein, where
they presented themselves 600 men strong. In the
great factory of Sigmund, Newhauser, and Co., five
new machines were totally destroyed and flung
into the water. The workmen suffered no injury;
the rest of the machinery and all otherproperty re-
mained untouched. The swarms thence ascended the
great Niesse to Rosenthal, to the factory of Herr Gin-
zel ; broke open the doors, destroyed from thirty to
forty new machines, dashed in the windows and tore
the frames from the walls. The looms with the yarn
were rent to pieces, the wool thrown into the water,
and in an hour's time three great weaving rooms were
thoroughly ransacked, and not a thing was left stand-
ing except the walls. The loss is immense. The mob
then took its way towards the factory of the Herren
Liebig and Co., in Josephinenthal ' • but the rumour
of the riot had now spread wide. Three companies
of soldiers were sent off from Jungbunzlau, three
from Prague, and the regiment of Lord Wellington,
in Theresienstadt, had order: to dispatch a battalion.
In the meantime, the town-guard of Reichenberg had
marched out, and after a stout close fight with-them
had succeeded in dispersing them and taking a good
many prisoners.

As we predicted, great is the excitement and
iscussion which these outbreaks have occasimed

in Germany. The Government. Commissions which
have sat, have declared in their reports that dis-
tress and want
not
work are not the causes of
them, and do exist. These, again, are con-
tradicted by the newspapers, and the repeated reduc-
tions of the rate of wages are referred to as evidence.
Unfortunately, no rate of wages is given by any party
by which we may judge, but if these bear any rela-
tion to that of the linen-weavers, ls. 6d. for 120 ells,
there is no mystery about the matter. Others, again,
charge the Seehandlung, or Government Association,
for buying up goods and selling them for_the pro-
fessed advantage of trade, with adding tg.-the mischief,
and actually adding to the competition against the
native manufacturers. In the Cologne Gazette it is
stated that not only have the linen merchants in
Berlin petitioned the King for the abolition of this
Seehandlung, but that similar ones are preparing from
the Rhine country, and it is added that near Solingen,
a great manufactory of cast steel knives, forks, and
scissors has been erected by this Association, to the
destruction of the same articles in welded steel ; all
parties, moreover, arguing loudly for an advance of
the duties of the Zollverein, as we foresaw, and for
sending out able ambassadors to North America and
the Brazils, to draw close the mercantile relations be-
tween Germany and these countries. It'is declared
that by the present tariff yarns ready prepared and
sized for the weavers, to bring them to which state
two-thirds of the whole labour and cost are required,
are admitted as common yarns, all which cost of
labour flows into the British pocket ; and as regards
American fields of exportation, it is asked whether the

Germans are really aware of the vast extent and popur
lation of Brazil and Mexico, and that the United States

contain themselves 113,800 geographical square miles ?
These are questions which we, too, must ask ourselves ;
they are doubly significant now that these agitations
force them, so vividly on the minds of •our German
manufacturing rivals.—A aas.