Chapter 244 Silesia
Silesia, the richest province in Prussia at the time, was known as the most loyal place in Prussia, but its civilians lived a life worse than pigs and dogs.
Unlike the merchants living in the cities of Posen and Breslau and the Junker landowners in their country houses, Silesia's lower class still lives in the same shabby houses with mud walls and thatched roofs a hundred years ago, earning a meager income. The income has made potatoes the only food on many families’ tables.
The weavers who sit in front of the loom all day don't even have a decent set of clothes. The extremely poor life makes people give up their moral bottom line. Many children are forced to go out to beg on the streets every day. Theft has become an encouraged habit. Behavior.
Among them, the linen weavers were the ones who suffered the most. With the development of the cotton textile industry, a large amount of cheap and high-quality cotton cloth occupied the linen market, causing the price of linen to plummet.
As industrialization spread, the situation worsened, and linen weavers' incomes plummeted.
At the same time, due to financial constraints, the Prussian government failed to introduce effective policies to protect the local linen textile industry and weavers. Instead, it required merchants and capitalists to pay the same taxes as in previous years.
As a result, the working hours of linen weavers continued to increase, and their wages were often deducted. They had to borrow money to survive in order to work and live.
As technology continues to develop and looms become more and more advanced, this small family-based workshop will inevitably be eliminated. A large number of weavers continue to go bankrupt due to their inability to repay their debts.
These homeless people enter urban factories and become so-called cheap labor. It's a pity that Prussia's textile industry was inherently lame, and it suffered greatly from the fluctuations in cotton prices and market fluctuations.
In order to pass on this risk, businessmen and capitalists naturally racked their brains and tried every means to exploit and squeeze workers.
What's even worse is that the local administration, police, courts and relief are completely controlled by the Junker aristocratic landowners.
Wealthy textile merchants only need to pay a certain percentage of taxes. Respectable nobles do not even pay taxes (they need to pay taxes in name, but they can be passed on to other people through a series of operations), while the taxes that weavers have to pay The proportion is much higher than that of merchants, and they have to bear various feudal obligations, service and special taxes.
This tax inequality intensified the local resistance.
In fact, looking at income alone, the average salary of textile workers in Silesia was 150 florins per year, which was higher than the average social level in Prussia at that time.
However, Silesia has the highest prices in Prussia, especially the average premium for daily necessities such as food, salt, coal, etc. is as high as 30%, and there are more taxes than in other parts of the country.
Drinks are the only affordable items here, but what the locals drink is not beer or wine, but spirits. At that time, spirits were synonymous with cheap wine and also called bad wine. You can imagine the physical condition of local people who drank this kind of wine for a long time.
The Prussian government was still very concerned about the decline of Silesia's economy, but several senior officials before and after simply attributed it to the laziness of the people at the bottom, as well as short-sightedness and lack of foresight.
But they ignored an important factor, that is, the Prussian government did not enact protective tariffs to protect its textile industry. Instead, it persuaded the German Customs Union to open the market to textiles from the British in exchange for exports of timber and agricultural products to the United Kingdom. rights and interests.
Trade with Russia has long been the key to Prussia's wealth.
However, after 1833, the textile industry in the "Greater Poland" area under Russian rule began to rise. The Russians set up trade barriers for their own interests, cutting off the possibility of Prussia dumping eastward.
To make matters worse, the Austrian Empire's great feat of territorial expansion by retaking Belgrade sounded an alarm to the Prussian top brass.
They believe that under the double blow of the local economic downturn and the decline of leading industries, the Silesians are likely to be like the Serbians in Belgrade and fall into the arms of Austria without firing a shot.
But in fact, due to religious issues at first, Silesians did not have much expectations for returning to Austria. However, as the economic and political environment continued to deteriorate, and the influence of the Austrian Empire continued to grow, some people had to start to reconsider this issue.
During the food crisis, due to the failure of Prussian governments at all levels to provide disaster relief, many people had to choose to leave their hometowns.
On the contrary, Austria took the initiative to launch a large number of relief-for-work programs, and these projects did not state that foreigners were not allowed to participate, especially since it was not difficult for Germans to pretend to be Austrians.
In fact, the overseers had been instructed long ago not to pay attention to the Germans from North Germany. Franz even sent people to spread this news within the German Confederation.
Many of the younger book friends may not know what a beggar is or why there are beggars. It is a group of people who make a living by begging, living on people's charity, usually asking for change and meals, and were later eliminated by QR codes.
There are many reasons for beggars, mainly due to the loss of basic living conditions caused by some force majeure (natural disasters, epidemic diseases, wars, etc.).
According to Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory, this type of beggars mainly want to meet their basic survival needs, that is, to have enough food and clothing to avoid starving to death and freezing to death. Once their basic survival needs can be met, they will generally give up begging and move towards a new way of survival.
There are also professional beggars, but there were not many of this type in Europe at this time. Of course, it was not that Europeans were very noble at that time, but that all countries had introduced corresponding methods to specifically deal with this group of people.
The British method was to whip, fine, imprison, and send to colonies.
In Prussia, imprisonment started at six weeks and could be punished by up to five years.
France: Forced labor, or sent directly to a mental hospital.
However, there are many organized beggar gangs in Europe. They usually kidnap and abduct children to act as beggars and beg on the streets. On the one hand, the police and military police rarely deal with children harshly. On the other hand, even if children are caught, they will only be sent to welfare homes. Or orphanages rather than being sent directly to prisons or colonies, except in England.
Therefore, the food-for-work program had great appeal to refugees within the German Confederation. At the same time, Franz is also promoting his immigration plan. When he comes to Austria, he will have land to farm, and he is willing to develop colonies overseas and get additional subsidies.
Although the vast majority of the refugees did not end up staying in Austria due to their aversion to loss, they brought a large amount of relevant information about the Austrian Empire back to their country, including the German version of "A Thousand Years Against the Waves".
They didn't feel anything when they listened to it on the construction site, and they didn't even feel anything when they learned to sing it. However, when they returned to their "motherland", they found that they didn't know what the music meant when they first heard it, but they already knew it when they listened to it again.
After a trip to the Austrian Empire, they returned home and discovered what a life they were living!
When a disaster strikes, the imperial government funds the disaster-stricken civilians to build projects, which not only allows the victims to live with dignity, but also prevents the next disaster from coming.
On the one hand, they are left to fend for themselves, while on the other hand, they are trying every means to keep them alive.