Page:Lars Henning Söderhjelm - The Red Insurrection in Finland in 1918 - tr. Annie Ingebord Fausbøll (1920).djvu/48

 requests the Red Guard to send some representatives to confer with the Protective Corps with a view to co-operation. This request is refused. On the 8th November there is a fresh communication from the municipal council. Information has been received from Estland giving a terrible description of the ravages of the Russian soldiers there. The municipal council therefore again requests the Red Guard to send some representatives to confer with the Protective Corps, in order that they may act in concert if the Russian military should begin to harry Finland as cruelly as Estland. According to the report the answer of the staff is to the effect that disturbances from the side of the Russians are not to be feared, and that all grounds are wanting for co-operation between the bourgeois and the working-men. At the same time the staff send two representatives and an interpreter to a Russian soldiers' meeting which "is dealing with the question of procuring arms for us." The result is good. They get their weapons. It must be noted that the staff is under the leadership of the Labour Party, and that the latter, as it appears from several places in the report, was also in direct negotiation with the Russians about the procuring of weapons.

This little incident gives a good idea of the situation. As yet the upper classes had such optimistic notions about the Red Guard of the Labour Party that they believed them ready to defend the country if it became necessary. But these latter were in reality already taken up by an energetic revolutionary co-operation with the Russians, and were arming themselves together with them against their own countrymen—at the same time assuring the latter that no danger threatened.

One more act of violence was committed during the first days of November, and one that attracted special attention, partly because it cost several people their