Prague received orders to see to it “that Bohemian newspapers moderate their tone.” That, of course, meant the inevitable lawsuits, police chicanery, confiscation, fines, jail.
To break the rebellious spirit of the Bohemians the government sent Baron Koller to Prague, as Military Governor, a soldier of the Radecký type of Austrian generals brutal, violent. One of his first acts was to place the capital under martial law (1868). Koller suspended the publication of nearly every Bohemian newspaper. Arrests for political crimes became so numerous that the jail of the New Town (one of the Boroughs of Prague) held at one time 400 prisoners, though there was room only for 250 persons. During 1868 in Prague alone Koller sent to jail 144 persons who were convicted of political misdemeanors and crimes. The total penalties aggregated 81 years. How many prisoners there were in the provincial towns in Bohemia and Moravia is only conjectured, but it was asserted afterwards that there had been five times as many as in Prague, so that the total number of political prisoners in Bohemia in 1868 was about 700.
When the Premier tried to placate the Bohemian opposition by suspending martial law (April, 1869) in Prague, the centralists became furious. Bohemian autonomy, declared their
