Chapter 244 Silesia

Silesia, the richest province in Prussia at that 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 landlords living in country villas, the lower class in Silesia still lived in the dilapidated houses with mud walls and thatched roofs a hundred years ago. The meager income made potatoes the only food on the tables of many families.

The weavers who sat in front of the loom all day didn't even have a decent set of clothes. The extremely poor life made people give up the bottom line of morality. Many children were forced to go out to beg on the streets every day, and theft became an encouraged behavior.

Among them, the group of linen weavers suffered the most. With the development of the cotton textile industry, a large number of cheap and high-quality cotton cloths occupied the linen market, causing the price of linen to plummet.

With the continuous extension of industrialization, this situation has continued to deteriorate, and the income of linen weavers has been greatly reduced.

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 rise, but their wages were often deducted. They had to go into debt to work and live.

With the continuous development of technology, looms became more and more advanced. This small workshop based on family units was inevitably eliminated. A large number of weavers went bankrupt due to their inability to repay their debts.

These homeless people entered the city factories and became the so-called cheap labor. It's a pity that Prussia's textile industry was born lame, and the fluctuations in cotton prices and market fluctuations made it suffer greatly.

In order to transfer this risk, merchants and capitalists naturally racked their brains to find all kinds of ways to exploit and squeeze workers.

What's more terrible is that the local administration, police, courts and relief are also completely controlled by the Junker nobles and landlords.

Wealthy textile merchants only need to pay a certain percentage of taxes, and respectable nobles do not even pay taxes (they need to pay taxes in name, but they can pass them on to others through a series of operations), while textile workers have to pay a much higher proportion of taxes than those merchants, and they have to bear various feudal obligations, service and special taxes.

This inequality in taxation has further exacerbated the resistance of the locals.

In fact, judging from income alone, the average salary of textile workers in Silesia is 150 florins per year, which is higher than the social average level in Prussia at that time.

However, Silesia has the highest prices in Prussia, especially food, salt, coal and other necessities of life, with an average premium of up to 30%, and more taxes than other parts of the country.

Alcohol is the only affordable commodity here, but the locals do not drink beer or wine, but spirits. At that time, spirits were synonymous with cheap wine, also known as inferior wine. The physical condition of the locals who drank this kind of wine for a long time can be imagined.

The Prussian government was still very concerned about the decline of the Silesia economy, but several senior officials before and after simply attributed it to the laziness of the lower classes, as well as short-sightedness and lack of foresight.

But they overlooked an important factor, that is, the Prussian government did not formulate protective tariffs to protect its textile industry, but instead persuaded the German Customs Union to open the market to accept textiles from the British in exchange for the right to export wood and agricultural products to Britain.

For a long time, trade with Russia has always been the key to Prussia's wealth.

However, after 1833, the textile industry in the "Greater Poland" region ruled by Russia began to rise. The Russians set up trade barriers for their own interests, cutting off the possibility of Prussia's dumping to the east.

To make matters worse, the great feat of the Austrian Empire to retake Belgrade and expand its territory sounded the alarm for the Prussian top leaders.

They believed that under the double blow of the local economic downturn and the decline of the leading industry, the Silesians were likely to throw themselves into the arms of Austria without firing a shot, just like the Serbs in Belgrade.

But in fact, at first, due to religious issues, the Silesians did not have much hope of returning to Austria. However, with the continuous deterioration of the economic and political environment and the increasing influence of the Austrian Empire, some people had to start reconsidering this issue.

During the food crisis, due to the poor disaster relief of governments at all levels in Prussia, many people had to choose to leave their hometowns.

On the contrary, Austria took the initiative to launch a large number of work-for-relief programs, and these projects did not indicate that foreigners could not participate, especially it was not difficult for Germans to disguise themselves as Austrians.

In fact, the supervisors had long been instructed not to pay attention to the Germans from northern Germany, and Franz even sent people to spread this news within the German Confederation.

Many young friends among the book friends may not know what beggars are, nor why there are beggars. It is a group of people who make a living by begging, living on charity, usually asking for change and food, and later eliminated by QR codes.

There are many reasons for beggars, mainly because of the loss of basic living conditions caused by some force majeure (natural disasters, epidemic diseases, wars, etc.), which leads to begging.

According to Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory, this type of beggars mainly seek to meet their basic survival needs, that is, to be well fed and clothed, so as not to starve to death or freeze to death. Once their basic survival needs are met, they will generally give up begging and move towards a new way of survival.

There are also professional beggars, but at this time in Europe, there are not many beggars of this type. Of course, it is not that Europeans were noble at the time, but that each country has introduced corresponding measures to deal with this group of people.

The British method is whipping, fines, imprisonment, and sending to colonies.

Prussia starts with six weeks of imprisonment, and the maximum sentence is five years.

France: forced labor, or directly sent to a mental hospital.

However, there are many organized beggar gangs in Europe, usually by kidnapping and abducting children to act as beggars and beg on the streets. On the one hand, the police and gendarmes rarely use cruel hands on children. On the other hand, even if children are caught, they will only be sent to welfare homes or orphanages, and will not be sent directly to prisons or colonies, but with the exception of Britain.

Therefore, the work-for-relief plan has great appeal to refugees in the German Confederation. At the same time, Franz was also promoting his immigration plan. If you come to Austria, you will have land to plant. If you are willing to develop colonies overseas, you will also receive additional subsidies.

Although most refugees did not stay in Austria in the end due to aversion to loss, they brought back a lot of relevant information about the Austrian Empire to their country, including the German version of "Against the Waves for Thousands of Years".

When they listened to it on the construction site, they didn't feel anything, and even when they learned to sing it, they didn't feel anything. However, when they returned to their "motherland", they found that they didn't understand the meaning of the song when they first heard it, but they were already the people in the song when they listened to it again.

After a trip to the Austrian Empire, they returned to their hometown and found out what kind of life they had lived!

When the disaster came, the imperial government funded the construction of the disaster-stricken civilians, which not only allowed the victims to live decently, but also prevented the next disaster from coming.

On the one hand, they let them fend for themselves, and on the other hand, they tried every means to keep them alive.