Expedient Mercy The thirty Austrian Socialists facing charges of high
treason in Vienna seem to have been treated with un- expected clemency. Fourteen were acquitted : the others received sentences varying from six to twenty months, and as the defendants have already been in prison for twelve months, all but three of them should now go free. What explains this clemency in a court where savage sentences, including the- death penalty for Herr Sailer and Frau Emhart, were demanded as punishment for organising the United Socialist Party of Austria ? It is that the Austrian Government feared the hostility aroused by the publicity given to the trial in the foreign Press ; and it is interesting to notice how, in such trials, in Austria and Germany, the mercy or cruelty of the court depend, not on justice, but tends to broad political expediency. Yet the evidence given of the savage ill-treatment suffered by the prisoners before trial shows that though the Austrian Government did not have the courage to convict them, it did have the brutality to beat them. And the police have demanded the return of some of the prisoners to the notorious con- centration camp at Wollersdorf. There, and in other places, according to official sources, 2,410 Socialists and Communists are still awaiting trial.
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