Page:Lars Henning Söderhjelm - The Red Insurrection in Finland in 1918 - tr. Annie Ingebord Fausbøll (1920).djvu/149

 and valiant boys in the Red Guard, for they are sacrificing their lives for the rights of man, for equality and fraternity, and for the good of the coming generations." The paper gives as an excuse that the article was taken from a provincial paper! Such a defence of murderers who have assaulted sixteen unarmed prisoners, people who have never taken up arms against the Red, speaks its own plain language.

The revolutionary tribunals excite the indignation of the Red Guard. Their sentences are absolutely too mild. As early as the 8th February, the General Staff express their dissatisfaction with this. On the 10th February the officers of the Guard have a meeting, and declare that the sentences passed by the tribunals are mere jokes—the Guard must intervene. "If the punishment of the butchers is not made more stringent," it is said among other things, "the number of prisoners will be greatly reduced, for then the men will begin to make use of self-redress."

The secretary of the revolutionary tribunal at Helsingfors defends his institution in a newspaper paragraph on the 17th February. He says: "We do not intend to be lenient with the really guilty, but hitherto only very few such have been given to us. Do your best, you who know the really guilty. Prove their guilt, for without proof no one can be sentenced."

No, this was exactly where the difficulty was. Who was guilty, and how could his guilt be proved; this guilt which consisted in a "counter-revolutionary spirit," the refusal to support the Red, the fact of being a "bourgeois," or, on the whole, unsympathetic? No tribunal could cope with such things. Such things the Red Guard must try to manage by themselves.

There were, however, revolutionary tribunals that suited the Red better. An investigation they were