Page:Lars Henning Söderhjelm - The Red Insurrection in Finland in 1918 - tr. Annie Ingebord Fausbøll (1920).djvu/39

 directing the muzzles of their guns against their own countrymen, against the hearts of the working-men. The prosperous open their purses and pay tribute of blood in order to protect their class interests."

And all this because eighteen malefactors have been arrested at Helsinge who have held the province in terror for weeks on end, and among which there was one assassin!

The police-school meets with a similar treatment. It says about it: "In Finland we have now over 100 Jack the Rippers. The bourgeois have made a mathematically correct calculation, for the result will be exactly the same whether you reduce the number of stomachs or increase the bread rations."

Whence all this? In part the articles may be accounted for as weapons in the electioneering campaign which was the forerunner of the new Lantdag elections. But the reason why the Labour Party entered the lists in defence of the misdeeds of the mob and the more and more violent anarchy in the country lay deeper. The power of the Bolshevik Party in Russia was growing, and with this party, among whose most eager adherents were the troops garrisoned in Finland and the crews of the Baltic fleet, the Finnish Labour Party was in lively connection. This party was to bring about the great social revolution throughout the world, one fine day it would take all power into its hands, and the Finnish "comrades" wished to take a share in this. They knew quite well that all the other parties in Finland would oppose a Finno-Russian proletariat dictatorship, they knew that the Protective Corps would resist such attempts to force Finland into the Russian chaos. Therefore they talked in this high strain, therefore Finland's respectable citizens were made to appear as bloodthirsty wild beasts, therefore the food crisis was presented as the outcome of their wish to starve "the labouring