Page:Lars Henning Söderhjelm - The Red Insurrection in Finland in 1918 - tr. Annie Ingebord Fausbøll (1920).djvu/14

 and dangerous. If anyone does him an injury, it burns deeper and deeper into his heart and grows into a dark hatred of the perpetrator. He lacks the power of firing up and then forgetting, for his character is that of the solitary and heavy brooder. He is not used to discipline and quick obedience. He must have a firm confidence in and an absolute affection for his masters to submit to them; but if so, he does it fully. He is a primitive individualist who does his work after his own mind, and only subordinates himself to the claims of society when he is absolutely convinced that it must be.

The consequence of this is that every universal effort, in order to gain a sure footing in a people thus constituted, and in order to spread and grow, must have the character of something sacred, of a religion. It must rank above every-day claims of utility, must be charged with matter of such a high spiritual kind that it has power to break through the craving for seclusion and through individualism and lead to a higher order of concord; it must create a sympathy closely akin to fanaticism. Those sort of spiritual movements are known expressly to Finland from rich experience. There have, of course, been many purely religious movements, but when the Finnish National Movement, the endeavour to raise the Finnish language to a culture-language from having been merely a vernacular of the common people, came into being in the middle of the nineteenth century, this also assumed an almost religious character. This justifiable and very natural movement grew to such enormous proportions for the very reason that it was raised to the rank of a religion. Its purpose was a twofold one, viz., to combat the predomination of the Swedish language, and to raise the level of education among the Finnish-speaking element of the people. In both directions it has often found fanatical expression, and as the negative results thereof