Page:Karl Liebknecht - Militarism (1917).djvu/181

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SOME CARDINAL SINS
149

that occasion even many of the bourgeois that had not been called out armed themselves against the workers. At about the same time the militia was mobilized at Basle for a strike. In 1904 the employers of the building trade at Chaux de Fonds called upon the government for military help against a strike which to their disgust was perfectly orderly in spite of all provocations and therefore hopeless from the employers' point of view; as a result, cavalry and a battalion of infantry appeared promptly on the scene and, by intimidating the proletarians who were conducting a legal fight, forced them back into capitalist slavery. It was also in 1904 that the military was called out against strikers at the Ricken, in the canton of St. Gall, to protect, as was alleged, the fruit and vegetable harvest which was in no way endangered. St. Gall also sent its militia to Rohrschach, where, during a disagreement about wages in the foundries owned by French capitalists, an excited crowd had smashed a few window-panes. A very serious affair took place at Zurich in the summer of 1906. In consequence of the