For the second time the “opposition tamer,” Baron Koller, was appointed Governor of Bohemia. To Moravia was sent the notorious Bohemiophobe, Baron Weber. As usual, the press was the first to feel the heel of these little despots. Public prosecutors throughout Bohemia and Moravia received instructions to proceed “fearlessly” against opposition journals. Those prosecutors who replied that they would do their duty strictly “in accordance with the law” were either removed or transferred to other posts and replaced by functionaries who were more mindful of the needs of the government. “It is not necessary in every instance to set forth the reason for the confiscation of a newspaper article,” the prosecutors were instructed. “The prosecutors have a full power to act and they are answerable to no one.” During the first year of the Auersperg-Lasser Ministry the daily newspaper “Politik” in Prague was confiscated 83 times by the conscientious prosecutor. A number of societies were dissolved, though non-political in character. An agricultural organization that had been founded during the reign of Maria Theresa and had survived the bitter days of Bach’s administration, was deprived of its charter because its president, Prince Charles Schwarzenberg, a Bohemian noble, declined to participate in the Vienna Exposition unless a separate space was allotted there to Bohemia, as to Hungary. Every presiding officer of the so-called District Committees in the provinces, who was suspected of being a Bohemian sympathizer, was summarily removed. Two of the most noted journalists, Julius Grégr and J. St. Skrejšovský, who had the courage to fight the Auersperg-Lasser Ministry openly, were put in jail for an alleged attempt to defraud the government of a trifling tax with which newspaper advertisements were assessable. Both languished in jail for months. As an instance of official meanness, the case of the publisher of the “Correspondence Slave” should be mentioned. This man received a long term in prison for failure to pay a newspaper tax amounting to less than half a florin (20 cents).