Page:Lars Henning Söderhjelm - The Red Insurrection in Finland in 1918 - tr. Annie Ingebord Fausbøll (1920).djvu/99

 liberty, pointed them out as the tools of Tsarism, black reactionaries, the executioners of the people and more to that effect—then they were guilty of a baseness, a meanness, and an infamy which can never be forgiven. For it was done against their better knowledge; it was an undisguised and conscious lie. What they built upon in the last instance was the old thirst for liberty among the masses which mainly concentrated in hatred against those in power, whoever they were. Therefore the social questions played only a negligible part in the whole tragedy.

If these, broadly speaking, were the motives of the Red, those of the White may be still more briefly summarised. White, before all, were those who understood that Finland must be plucked from out of the whirlpool of the Russian revolution, so as not to be destroyed, who perceived the difference between a Western state of culture, law and order, and the Eastern chaos of Russia, who comprehended into what an abyss a proletariat dictatorship, like that of the Bolsheviks, hurled a country and a people. To these belonged also all "bourgeois," all the "cultivated" classes, the whole "intelligentsia"—apart from pecuniary circumstances. The Red met with complete, unanimous resistance from board-school teachers, subordinate functionaries, clerks, technicists and the like. Again, all those were White who had come under the direct rule of violence of the Red. To these belonged all peasants, the majority of the population of the country. They were not without the universal yearning for liberty, but with them it had remained healthy. They felt the brutal violence intensely, whether it came from above or from below, and they reacted against it. On the whole, the country population was exceedingly sparsely represented among the Red. Only the random, unemployed population