Page:Lars Henning Söderhjelm - The Red Insurrection in Finland in 1918 - tr. Annie Ingebord Fausbøll (1920).djvu/41

 the "Socialists," the Social-Democratic Party was still the official name of the Labour Party. This party had appeared as the protector of the mob and the friend of the Russian soldiers. It must now be the object of the country to choose between being dragged into the Russian revolution whithersoever this would tend, or resolutely avoiding it, taking its fate into its own hands and re-establishing order. Fortunately, it was seen that the infection from the Russian revolution had not impregnated the whole people. The Labour Party lost its majority. It returned 92 representatives against 108 bourgeois.

This was a hard blow to the "Socialists." They had gone to the poll with the firm assurance of victory. The many successful strikes, by which wages had been screwed up considerably, had increased the number of the organised labourers almost tenfold, and these were safe votes. Besides this, it was reckoned that the chances for an extreme radicalism were now, in the midst of the world-war and the Russian revolution, better than they had ever been. Only for this reason did the Socialists take part in the elections at all. The Labour Party had not acknowledged the dissolution of the Lantdag, and announced that the new elections were "illegal." They took part in them, however, with the assumption that for the new Lantdag "it could not be claimed that it should in every respect conform to the before-existing legal rules," as it said in the party's call to the poll—but that in opposition to the usual rules of procedure of the Lantdag, it had the right to sanction fundamental laws and taxation acts by simple majority, and also to act as a free constituent assembly.

So that was it. The people elected a Lantdag, but when it was well elected, and had got its Socialistic majority, it would reveal itself as a constituent assembly!