had also promised to convoke the Bohemian Parliament in the course of the month of June, leaving it to Count Leo Thun, as representative of the Austrian Government in Bohemia, to fix the day.
All the hopes of Bohemia were destroyed by the action of Prince Windischgrätz. The members of the Slavic congress immediately dispersed; the meeting of the Bohemian Parliament was indefinitely postponed and, indeed, never took place; the national committee was dissolved; Prague and most of the Bohemian towns were placed in a state of siege. At the end of the year 1848 Prague was for a short time freed from this state, but it was re-established a few months later, as the police spies again maintained that they had discovered a vast conspiracy in Bohemia. It appears that the fact that a few students had incautiously spoken with disapproval of the Government was the only foundation of this denunciation. The courts-martial resumed their activity, which became even greater than before. As constitutional government had not yet been formally abolished, the military and police officials considered it their duty to prove the existence of far-reaching conspiracies, which justified the maintenance of martial law. For this purpose they used means not differing widely from the customs of the middle ages.[1]
The liberty of the press, after a brief spell of freedom again disappeared. In Prague almost all the papers except the organ of the Government discontinued publication. The editors who were sufficiently venturesome not to do so were subject to bitter and persistent persecution. Even the tamest criticism of Government measures rendered the writer and the editor liable to fines and imprisonment. As the reactionary movement was directed in Bohemia by men whose sympathies were entirely German, the papers written in the national language were treated far worse than the German ones, and they soon disappeared altogether, while some German papers continued to be published during the whole period of absolutism. Among the Bohemian journalists
- ↑ The regulations of the courts-martial authorized the presidents of such courts, should they think that a witness obstinately refused to give evidence or attempted to mislead the authorities, to have corporal punishment inflicted on such a person. It was in the case of grown men to consist of not more than fifty strokes with a stick, in the case of youths and women of not more than thirty strokes with a birch-rod.
