Page:Lars Henning Söderhjelm - The Red Insurrection in Finland in 1918 - tr. Annie Ingebord Fausbøll (1920).djvu/21

 read a sufficient number of reports in the papers, about stormy scenes in the parliaments of the Balkan States and elsewhere, to know to the full how cheerfully a session may shape itself with "noise from the Left Parties," applause, interruptions and all sorts of enlivening riots. The Single-Chamber gave on the whole a very melancholy picture of the cultural level of the people.

Upon the improved conditions inaugurated with the general strike there soon followed a period of increasing Russian reaction. In Finland, where the Russian policy of repression had hitherto been regarded wholly and solely as the outcome of views within the highest bureaucracy, it was now discovered that also great portions of the Russian people saw in the national annihilation of Finland a great and necessary mission for the Russian Empire. The Duma sanctioned illegal measures against Finland. A fresh era of outrage and violence began for this country. With a certain weariness and pessimism the policy of passive resistance was there taken up again. The work of the Lantdag became mere desolation, partly because all the protests of the Chamber against the new rule of unlawfulness were followed by decrees of dissolution; partly because the enactments of the Single-Chamber were never corroborated in St. Petersburg; and, last but not least, because the most powerful party in the Lantdag, the Social Democrats, resorted to tactics of opposition and obstruction which distorted the decisions and gave rise to endless, unceremonious debates.

As said before, the Labour Party had struck into parliamentary paths—that is to say, they now aspired to gain the means of power that could be obtained in the altered circumstances in which no overt Russo-Finnish revolution could be thought of, viz., the majority in the Lantdag. All their work was agitation against the upper class, the bourgeoisie, the capitalists. One catchword