Page:Karl Liebknecht - Militarism (1917).djvu/179

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SOME CARDINAL SINS
147

militia wounded 50 persons, some of them severely.

Switzerland.

Switzerland's record in this field of military activity is truly quite a long one. As early as 1869 the government of Geneva employed both the police force and the militia against striking workmen. In the same year the government of the canton of Vaud recalled by telegraph a battalion that had marched off to do military exercises, supplied it with ball-cartridges and had it march with fixed bayonets into the town, where the workmen were on strike. It was also in 1869 that the government of Basle made troops act as pickets against the workers when the women silk weavers struck to improve their miserable conditions; and when in the same year a strike of vase-makers and engravers broke out at La Chaux de Fonds, the new bourgeois government provided itself with arms and ammunition for a possible mobilization of the militia.

In 1875 blood was shed. The government of the canton of Uri mobilized the militia against