Page:Lars Henning Söderhjelm - The Red Insurrection in Finland in 1918 - tr. Annie Ingebord Fausbøll (1920).djvu/20

 The situation was complicated. Certainly the whole of Finland sympathised with the Russian revolutionary movement, but we had—at least to a certain degree—arrived at a possibility of shaping our own internal affairs. Therefore no sensible citizen wished to draw our people into the great Russian muddle. Our strength and our safeguard were law-abidingness, loyalty; we did not want to fling our whole "Western" position to the winds and plunge into the Eastern maelstrom. Yet the line between the two was not always easy to find, and the working-men did not see it. With Finnish doggedness and stubbornness they had adopted the frail phantasms and Utopias of the Russians. What were to these latter only card-houses, built up in a moment of excitement, and the collapse of which was viewed later on with a shrug of the shoulders, became to the Finnish working-man a sacred, solid temple, firmly fixed, and incapable of ever falling in.

In face of the danger which threatened the unity of the people from the Labour bands—in hopes of satisfying them and giving them what they had learned to regard as a right—the Assembly of Estates, the Lantdag, was now transformed to a representative assembly so democratic that the world has never yet seen its like. It became a Single-Chamber, the 200 representatives of which were returned by a system of universal suffrage for all men and women that had completed their twenty-fourth year. The first elections for this parliament took place in March, 1907. The Labour Party got eighty representatives.

In the meanwhile the Red Guard had been dissolved and the participants in the Sveaborg revolt sentenced to penal servitude. The Single-Chamber opened up a new field of work for the Labour Party which therefore struck into parliamentary paths. They had, however,