Page:Lars Henning Söderhjelm - The Red Insurrection in Finland in 1918 - tr. Annie Ingebord Fausbøll (1920).djvu/72

 representatives in the Lantdag had been forbidden to leave Helsingfors without a written permit from the chief of the Red Guard.

To everyone in the Labour Party who was not blinded by hatred of the bourgeoisie and lust of power it must be plain that a revolution in Finland would be utter madness. With the power it commanded in parliament the party might carry through almost any reforms and had, as before mentioned, already got some extremely radical bills passed while others were on the road. The demand for a Constituent Assembly was devoid of all sense, as the country's parliament might be considered as such, and as it had been seen how the good party comrades, the Bolsheviks, had dissolved their National Assembly in Russia. The only point on which the bourgeoisie parties insisted inexorably was the question of Finland being drawn into the maelstrom of the Russian revolution. The most primitive instinct of self-preservation was sufficient to tell one that the only way the country ought not to choose was just the way the Red Guard Corps were going.

And to the more experienced men among the leaders of the Labour Party, too, Finland's immersion in the Russian revolution really looked like a very serious matter. The condition of affairs in Finland was too different from that in Russia for any possibility of carrying through the programme of the social revolution of the Bolsheviks in Finland. In the first place there could not be any question of "nationalising" the land in a country with a very large class of freeholding peasantry. So Finland was to take part in the Russian revolution, and yet not take any real part in it—so vague was the programme, so great the vacillation. These vague feelings among the leaders of the party, the conviction