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 it watch over more and more over the interests of the workers, and so to transform the State into a Socialist Society.

A social policy on these lines was in the minds of the Finnish People's Commissariat. At anyrate a certain number of its members expected that, the majority of the Democratic Diet would adopt the measure of taking over the big timber and paper factories on the scale mentioned above, and of putting external commerce under State control, which would, of course, have resulted in a change in the situation of the State Bank. It is difficult and useless now to speculate as to what would have happened if German Imperialism had not come to the rescue of the capitalists of Finland: if the workers had obtained the victory. But without yielding to such vague speculations, it can now be seen that the idea of the Democratic State, with which the People's Commissariat deluded itself, was historically false.

It wished to build a bridge, to construct a passage from Capitalism to Socialism. But Democracy is unable to bear the burden of such a mission. Its historic character has made itself felt in the course of the Revolution. It satisfied neither the bourgeois now the workers, although no one openly declared against it. The bourgeoisie did not think it prudent to declare against democracy, and the workers, these same workers who in 1904–5 had fought with such glowing enthusiasm for democracy, remained indifferent enough. For one party as for the other, the dictatorship was now alone to be desired for the bourgeoisie the White Dictatorship, for the workers the Red Dictatorship. Both felt in their secret hearts that the democratic plan was neither a compromise nor a reconciliation. To one and to the other, their own power seemed to be preferred to any popular power or Democracy.

Democracy was the governing system of the previous year in Finland. The Russian bourgeois revolution of March had made a present of it to our country. On paper it did not exist any more than it did as a generally recognised and fundamental law, but it existed "de facto" for all that. It was by no means a complete form of Democracy comparable with the scheme put forward later on by the People's Commissariat; but it was as good as it was possible for it to be in a Bourgeois State. To go farther along the democratic road, in other words to make use of the class war without