Page:Lars Henning Söderhjelm - The Red Insurrection in Finland in 1918 - tr. Annie Ingebord Fausbøll (1920).djvu/27

 its constituents round the old familiar catchwords, and thus it obtained the power in parliament it had so eagerly coveted. The results of the election were 103 Labour representatives and 97 Bourgeois. The Labour Party was now in absolute majority.

When the Russian revolution broke out in March, 1917, it was, of course, welcomed with the greatest joy throughout all Finland, especially as the Government elected by the Duma immediately took up the Finnish question. The strongest feeling of deliverance and relief was, however, in the beginning due to the fact that our political prisoners in Russia might now be sure of liberation. Since the autumn of 1915 the leader of the Lantdag, Svinhufvud, had been in Siberia; thither also the mayor of Vasa city, Hasselblatt, and several others had been deported; the chief of the fire department was in the interior of Russia, and, finally, a hundred Finnish patriots had been confined for months in the prisons of St. Petersburg awaiting sentence of death. The thought of these unhappy victims to the struggle for our right had lain like a heavy load on the whole community; it was to them, therefore, that the first joyful thoughts from Finland went out.

Nor was it long before information was received that the new Russian Government had done everything in its power, viz., once more restored to Finland all her rights. Still at the same time it was found that the representatives of our Labour Party had preferred the demand that the Russian Provisional Government should introduce into its manifesto promises of the social reforms desired by the party; but as these demands were at