great increase in the prices of all necessaries of life several strikes for higher wages had broken out in that city, when the workmen employed in the building trades likewise proclaimed a strike for the same reason. The militia interfered without the slightest cause with sanguinary results, and beat and clubbed the striking workmen in the most brutal fashion, dragging especially the foreign strikers off to the barracks where they were struck with riding-whips under the direction of the officers. Moreover, picketing was prohibited as well as every kind of demonstration. The interpellation relating to those infamous events which was presented in the Grand Council was at first laid on the shelf and finally simply throttled without any discussion by the solid bourgeois majority. And to cap it all, six of the strike leaders were put on trial and, on August 24, 1906, Sigg was sentenced to be imprisoned for eight months and to forfeit his active civic rights for one year, for an alleged incitement to mutiny by means of an anti-militarist leaflet addressed to the militia; the other five were acquitted.
