Page:Lars Henning Söderhjelm - The Red Insurrection in Finland in 1918 - tr. Annie Ingebord Fausbøll (1920).djvu/133

 inconvenience befell the great circles of citizens who were exposed to the arresting propensities of the Red. Members of the Protective Corps were, of course, eagerly sought, as well as members of the Government. During the first days of the revolution a number of Lantdag members were arrested, but most of them were liberated shortly after. On the 14th March, however, the order is given for the immediate arrest of all bourgeois members of the Lantdag. Already before—on the 6th March—the War and Economical Committee of the Central Council had preferred a proposal for the wholesale imprisonment of the following persons: All former members of the Government and district magistrates; all presidents and cashiers of the town and parish councils, all bank managers and bank cashiers, "all millionaires jobbing in shares," all merchants and manufacturers who had closed their business. All these should be kept in prison until the victory has been won. But the arrests were never very systematic. Informers flourished, bringing about the arrest of now one and now the other, and, besides, people were arrested because they had let fall a "counter-revolutionary" remark in the streets, or smiled at some absurdly bold and oddly equipped Red warrior.

The Red had a special grudge against all the functionaries who refused to work under their leadership—i.e., all government officials. It was also difficult to find out a suitable way of treating them. Of course the right to strike had been proclaimed as one of the first rights of man, but such things were not for the "bourgeois." With them it was not strike, but "sabotage." But the difficulty was that on the one hand it had been solemnly promised that the bureaucracy should be crushed—and now it had been completely destroyed—but, on the other hand, one could not do