The Semi Weekly Messenger

Dead May Reach Hundreds

Disorders at Lodz Amounted to Actual Insurrection—Troops Desperately Opposed by 60,000 Workingmen.

St. Petersburg, June 25.—3:20 a. m.—St. Petersburg is without definite news of the happenings on Friday and last night at Lodz, and there is the keenest apprehension that Saturday may have been marked by a renewal of the battle of Friday, the dead of which are apparently to be numbered by hundreds.

Nothing approaching the disorders, which passed far beyond the scale of recent demonstrations and approximated the dignity of actual insurrection, recalling the days of the Commune in Paris, has been recorded in Russia since the street fighting at Warsaw during the Polish revolutions of 1830 and 1863. The events of January 12 in St. Petersburg, "red Sunday" were merely the dispersal of unarmed crowds by soldiers, but at Lodz the troops were desperately opposed by an army of sixty thousand workingmen, many armed with revolvers, defending substantial barricades with bullets and showers of paving stones and other missiles and even bombs.

The industrials were apparently largely in the hands of the manifesto and the task of the troops was akin to that of the Russian soldiers in the war in Turkestan, when towns had to be stormed, street by street, almost house to house.

The demolition of the barricades at Lodz required regular sapper work, under the fire of revolvers and showers of missiles from windows of houses, and by which the troops suffered heavily. The military governor had at his disposal four regiments of infantry and two of cavalry. The last barricades were taken at four o'clock Saturday morning. A dispatch received by way of Warsaw estimates the number of slain indefinitely at "several hundred workmen," and sixty soldiers; but no definite statement has yet been received, another dispatch direct from Lodz giving forty dead being admittedly incomplete.