Page:Lars Henning Söderhjelm - The Red Insurrection in Finland in 1918 - tr. Annie Ingebord Fausbøll (1920).djvu/78

 acceptable to the Labour Party by letting the force be under the commune. On the 9th January the Government finally sent the Lantdag a proposal for the establishment of a strong force for the maintenance of order, under the control of the Government, to put a stop to the anarchy in the country. As this proposal has been characterised by the Labour Party as an undisguised challenge and declaration of war, there may be some reason to print it here in its entirety. The proposal runs as follows:—

After long-continued sore trials and sufferings our country has attained political independence and freedom. But the interior situation of the country does not in any way answer to even the most primitive foundation for or claims of such a free position. The necessary order does not reign in the country, neither as regards the life, property and rights of our own fellow-countrymen, or those of the numerous foreigners living here. The daily statements, both of the authorities concerned, and the foreign representatives, and the papers, speak of this in the plainest terms. This very day there have been sanguinary encounters in the near neighbourhood of the city between the so-called Red Guard of Helsingfors and the peaceful population, provoked by the former, in which even lives have been lost. From Åbo communication has just been received that the Red Guard of that city has insulted three Swedes, and amongst other things thrown their luggage into the street from a hotel. Anarchist elements, arrived from Russia, have come to stay here, and are acting quite overtly and with violence, sowing the seed of revolution and anarchy among such elements among the soldiers garrisoned here as were already beforehand somewhat unquiet. The state of affairs grows every moment more and more serious, and,