Page:Lars Henning Söderhjelm - The Red Insurrection in Finland in 1918 - tr. Annie Ingebord Fausbøll (1920).djvu/32

 police by preference—whereas now it was the express policy of the Labour Party to destroy the police entirely. The police force, which had been ousted by the Russian soldiers at the very beginning of the revolution, never came into being again. The "people" felt no confidence in this institution, and in its stead local corps for the maintenance of order were established—a "militia," the men of which were to belong to the Labour Party. The struggle to get the police authority of the country entirely into its own hands was so energetically carried on by the Labour Party, and was so successful, that later on in the year the militia in many cases gave the signal for all sorts of disturbances by striking first. Already in the course of the summer the police force of Helsingfors struck, and this act was of course illustrated by a whole series of offences, from the picking of pockets to murder, as was very natural in a city of 200,000 inhabitants which was without any real police, and was besides the haunt of huge masses of undisciplined Russian soldiers.

In the meanwhile the many strikes and the general disturbance had another effect which was also of advantage to the Labour Party. They scared the bourgeoisie. This latter now got to know what "the power of the people" meant; it realised that the proletariat no longer begged and prayed, but claimed and demanded. Never, I suppose, has the working-man, but especially the rough, felt so puffed up with power as in the year 1917 in Finland; never, I suppose, has the bourgeois had so strong a feeling as then that he was only tolerated and that his part was only silence and acquiescence. It was felt in the streets and in tram-cars—everywhere where people of different classes came together—that Finland had got a ruler, that the working-men with the assistance of the Russian soldiers had come to feel that