Page:Lars Henning Söderhjelm - The Red Insurrection in Finland in 1918 - tr. Annie Ingebord Fausbøll (1920).djvu/22

 which proved most effective was the epithet "Butchers of the People," which had been fastened on the White Protective Corps during the general strike. "Butchers" now were all non-working-men, and the word was an excellent termination to the well-known series—robbers, bloodsuckers, misers. The class struggle was proclaimed; Internationalism, Anti-Militarism, Atheism and Free Marriage were exalted to new lodestars of humanity. The industries suffered greatly during the agitation work. Strike followed upon strike; the distrust of employers and foremen was unlimited.

The most melancholy thing about the whole of these tactics was no doubt the systematically created distrust of all human motives. The whole activity of the "bourgeois," all his thoughts and efforts, were directed only towards one goal—the fleecing of the working-man in order that he might become rich himself. And the working-man's sole claim to existence was in his efforts to obtain better conditions of life; poverty was the root of all evil, of all sorrows and sufferings. By this view the "bourgeois" of Finland, amongst others, were shamefully wronged. They had fought bravely for the rights of their country and on the whole for Western culture in the common native land. They had been imprisoned, exiled and sent to Siberia—nay, in 1911–17 some fifty Government functionaries had been shut up in Russian prisons because they refused to obey illegal Russian orders. All this was suppressed in the Labour press, all this did not exist to the excited working-class; on the contrary, Finland's upper classes were represented as miserable tools in the hands of Tsarism.

The agitation of the Labour Party was mendacious, brutal and mean. This was chiefly caused by the fact that the party had never succeeded in securing any honest, upright and trustworthy leaders. Its touring