1883, at
Floridsdorf, a police official named Hlubek was murdered, and the
condemnation of Rouget, who was convicted of the crime, on June 23,
1884, was immediately answered the next day by the murder of the
police agent Bloect. The Government now took energetic measures. By
order of the Ministry, a state of siege was proclaimed in Vienna and
district from January 30, 1884, by which the usual tribunals for
certain crimes and offences were temporarily suspended, and the
severest repressive measures were exercised against the Anarchists, so
that Anarchism in Austria rapidly declined, and at the same time it
soon lost its leaders. Stellmacher and Kammerer were executed, Penkert
escaped to England, most of the other agitators were fast in prison,
the journals were suppressed and the groups broken up. The same
occurred in Hungary, which had only followed the fashion in Austria,
for in Hungary the social question is by no means so acute and the
public movement in it is merely political.

At present Anarchism in Germany and Austria is confined to an (at
most) harmless doctrinaireism, and it will be well to accept with
great reserve any statements to the contrary; for neither those who
were condemned at the last Anarchist trial at Vienna, nor the Bohemian
Anarchist and Omladinist trials, nor the suspected persons who have
recently migrated to Germany, appear to have been more than half
conscious of Anarchism, nor do they appear to have had any
international associations.

In Belgium, also, after the passing of the German Socialist laws, a
difference of opinion became manifest among the working classes, which
gave new life to Anarchism, almost extinct as it was at the end of the
seventies. The "German Reading Union" in Brussels split into two
parties, the more radical of which was filled with Most's ideas and
eagerly agitated for the dissemination of his _Freedom_. As this
radical tendency had found many supporters among the German
Socialists, it made itself noticeable at the Brussels Congress of
1880. The keener became the struggle between the Most-Hasselmann and
the Bebel-Liebknecht parties, the more sharply defined became the
opposition in the ranks of the Belgian working classes. The Radicals
united into a "Union Revolutionnaire"; founded their own party organ,
_La Perseverance_, at Verviers; and declared themselves in favour of
the London Congress as against that at Coire. The others held
quarterly advisory congresses at