Page:Lars Henning Söderhjelm - The Red Insurrection in Finland in 1918 - tr. Annie Ingebord Fausbøll (1920).djvu/87

 arms, beg machine guns and cannon of the Russians. They get all they want, and concentrate their forces round Helsingfors. Now the moment for the revolution has come.

During these days the Government laboured strenuously at keeping the Russian soldiers outside the conflict. It repeatedly approached the representative of the Russian Government, the Rayon Committee, with written communications, appeals, wishes, and suggestions. The committee were obliging and sympathetic, but did nothing. It evidently seemed quite natural to them that the Russian soldiers harried an independent, neutral country as they did. As nothing helped, the Government at last, on the 25th and the 26th of January, addressed itself directly to the Russian Government by a telegram, and by written communications to the Governments of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, France, England, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Greece, and by an appeal to the Finnish people. These three documents ran as follows:—

"To the Council of People's Commissioners.

"During the last days there has been committed murder, incendiarism, and a number of disturbances in several places in Finland, in which soldiers staying here have taken part, not only by protecting those elements in the people that have caused the disorder, but even by themselves taking part in the acts of violence which it had not been possible to carry into effect without the assistance given by the soldiers. As it has been stated that the deliberate participation of the Russian soldiers herein is said to be founded on directions and orders given by the military authorities, Finland's Government, who consider such behaviour on the part of the soldiers as a flagrant violation of Finland's internationally acknowledged independence, have resolved to