Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/229

Rh of the towns of Keksholm and Villmanstrand; and by 1716 all the country was in his power. Meantime the sufferings of the people had been great; thousands perished in the wars of Charles XII. By the peace of Nystad in 1721 the province of Wiborg, the eastern division of Finland, was finally ceded to Russia. But the country had been laid very low by war, pestilence, and famine, though it recovered itself with wonderful rapidity. In 1741 the Swedes made an effort to recover the ceded province, but through wretched management suffered disaster, and were compelled to capitulate in August 1742, ceding by the peace of Åbo, next year, the towns of Villmanstrand and Fredrikshamn. Nothing remarkable seems to have occurred till 1788, under Gustavus III., who began to reign in 1771, and who gave the Finlanders those fundamental laws by which they are still essentially governed. The country was divided into six governments, a second superior court of justice was founded at Wasa, many new towns were built, commerce nourished, and science and art were encouraged. Latin disappeared as the academic language, and Swedish was adopted. In 1788, however, war again broke out between Sweden and Russia, and was carried on for two years without much glory or gain to either party, the main aim of Gustavus being to recover the lost Finnish province. In 1808, under Gustavus IV., peace was again broken between the two countries, and the war ended by the cession in 1809 of the whole of Finland and the Aland Islands to Russia, which has ever since maintained her supremacy. The Finlanders themselves fought bravely against Russia, and it is said that bribery had not a little to do with the result. The emperor Alexander I. convoked the diet at Borgo in 1809, when he issued a manifesto undertaking to preserve the religion, laws, and liberties of the country. This pledge has been taken by his successors, and probably Finland is the freest and best governed part of the Russian empire. A senate was created and a governor-general named. The province of Wiborg was reunited to Finland in 1811, and Åbo remained the capital of the country till 1821, when the civil and military authorities were removed to Helsingfors, and the university in 1827. The diet, which had not met for 56 years, was convoked by Alexander II. at Helsingfors in 1863, and has met every five years since. Since 1860 Finland has been allowed the use of a coinage peculiar to itself. Under Alexander II. Finland has been on the whole prosperous and progressive. The use of the Finnish tongue is everywhere encouraged, though the upper classes mostly use Swedish, and the study of the Russian language was made compulsory in all the state schools in 1872.

Ethnology and Language.—The term Finns has a wider application than Finland, being, with its adjective Finnic or Finno-Ugric or Ugro-Finnic, the collective name of the westernmost branch of the great Uralo-Altaic family, dispersed throughout Finland, Lapland, the Baltic provinces (Esthonia, Livonia, Courland), parts of Russia proper (south of Lake Onega), both banks of middle Volga, Perm, Vologda, West Siberia (between the Ural Mountains and the Yenissei), and Hungary. It consists of five groups: (1) the Finns proper; (2) the Lapps; (3) the Permian Finns; (4) Volga Finns; (5) Ugrian Finns. (1) The first group comprises the Suomi or Suomelaisset, i.e., Fen-men, who occupy nearly all Finland except a portion on the Gulf of Bothnia, about Wasa, where Swedish is spoken; next, the Karelians, who extend from Russian Lapland south to the Gulf of Finland and Lake Ladoga, and east to the White Sea and the shores of Lake Onega; thirdly, the Chudic, a Slav term often applied to the whole group, but now restricted to the Veps or northern Chud and the Votic or southern Chud, dwelling in scattered communities round the shores of Lake

Onega; and lastly, the Baltic Finns, including the Este or Esthonian, occupying the greater part of the southern coast of the Gulf of Finland and the northern half of Livonia, and the Livonian or Krevinian occupying a small corner in the north-west of Courland. (2) The Lapps occupy the extreme north-west of Russia, and some parts of northern Sweden and Norway. (3) The Permian Finns comprise the Siryenians, occupying an extensive region between 60° N. lat. and the Arctic circle and 50° E. long. and the Ural Mountains, but mainly in the section of the government of Vologda; the Permian proper, formerly diffused throughout Perm, Viatka, Oufa, &c., now surviving in isolated communities mainly about the upper Kama; and the Votyak, occupying a relatively compact territory in Viatka as far north as Glazov on the river Tchepsa. (4) The Volga Finns include the Cheremissian on the left bank of the Volga, from a little west of Kazan to near Nijni-Novgorod; and the Mordvinian, divided into small communities on both banks of the Volga, about Simbirsk, Samara, Stavropol, and Tambov. (5) The Ugrian Finns include the Voguls, extending from the Ural Mountains east to near the river Obi and south to Tobolsk; the Ostyaks, from the Voguls east to the river Yenissei, between Turuchansk and Yenisseisk, and from the Arctic circle to 59° N. lat.; and the Magyars of Hungary. These five groups form one linguistic family, to which Samoyede is related. The richest and most highly cultivated languages of the family are the Suomi and Magyar. The dialects are all distinctly agglutinative forms of speech, with decided tendencies towards true inflexion, so much so that in many grammatical endings the essential difference between agglutination and inflexion becomes obscured. As in other Uralo-Altaic tongues, progressive vowel-harmony forms a characteristic feature of the Finnic group. Rask considered the Finnish language the most sonorous and harmonious of tongues. It is maintained by some that the Finnic languages represent the oldest forms among the Uralo-Altaic groups. There is strong evidence that the Finns, or a closely allied race, must have at one time, probably prehistoric, been spread over a considerable area of central if not of western Europe.

Originally nomads (hunters and fishers), all the Finnic people except the Lapps and Ostyaks have long yielded to the influence of civilization, and now everywhere lead settled lives as herdsmen, agriculturists, traders, &c. Physically the Finns are a strong, hardy race, of low stature, with almost round head, low forehead, flat features, prominent cheek bones, eyes mostly grey and oblique (inclining inwards), short and flat nose, protruding mouth, thick lips, neck very full and strong, so that the occiput seems flat and almost in a straight line with the nape; beard weak and sparse, hair no doubt originally black, but, owing to mixture with other races, now brown, red, and even fair; complexion also somewhat brown. The Finns are morally upright, hospitable, faithful, and submissive, with a keen sense of personal freedom and independence, but also somewhat stolid, revengeful, and indolent. Many of these physical and moral characteristics they have in common with the so-called “Mongolian” race, to which they are no doubt ethnically, if not also linguistically, related.

Literature.— Finland can boast of a varied literature more or less indigenous, the great monument of which is, however, the Kalewala, a sort of epic poem, which, until the present century, existed only in fragments in the memories and on the lips of the peasantry. A collection of these scattered songs was published in 1822 by Dr Zacharias Topelius, but it was not till 1835 that anything like a complete and systematically arranged collection was given to the world by Dr Elias Lönnrot. For years Dr