JOHN JACKOL

“Russia is the rock against which the sigh for freedom breaks,” said Kossuth, the great statesman and patriot of Hungary.  Although fifty years have passed, and sigh after sigh has broken against it, the rock still stands like a colossal monument of bygone ages.  It is pointing toward the northern star, as if to remind one of the all-enduring fixity.  Other stars may go round as they will; there is one fixed in its place, and under that star the shadow of despotism hopes to endure forever.

While yet in Finland I used to fancy Russia as a giant devil-fish, whose arms extended from the Baltic to the Pacific, from the Black Sea to the Arctic Ocean.  Then I would think of my native land as a beautiful mermaid, about whom the giant’s cold, chilly arms were slowly creeping, and I feared that some day those arms would crush her.  That day has come.  The helpless mermaid lies prostrate in the clutch of the octopus.  Not that the constitution of Finland has been annulled, as has been so often erroneously stated, and quite generally believed.  The Russian Government has made only a few inroads upon it.  The great grievance of the Finns is not with what has been absolutely done in opposition to their ancient rights and privileges, nor in the number of their rights which have in reality been curtailed, but with the fact that they have henceforth no security.  The real grievance of the Finns is that the welfare of their country no longer rests upon an inviolable constitution, but upon the caprice of the ministers.

In 1898 the reactionists succeeded in getting one of their tools appointed as Governor-General.  No sooner had General Bobrikoff taken his high office than he declared that the Finnish right to separate political existence was an illusion; that there was no substantial foundation for it in any of the acts or words of Alexander I. The people were amazed, appalled.  But this was not all.  Pobiedonostseff, the Procurator of the Holy Synod, and other men as reactionary as he, discovered the fact, or gave birth to the idea, that the fundamental rights of Finland could be interfered with if these fundamental rights interfered with the welfare of the Russian Empire.  In other words, they discovered a loophole which they termed legal, on the principle that the parts should suffer for the whole, and that this principle was an integral part of the plan of Russian government.

The abrogation of maintenance of Finland’s ancient rights would seem by this decision to rest on the arbitrary interpretation on the part of Russia as to whether or not they interfered with the welfare of the empire.  It is possible that, according to the individual opinions of Russian autocrats, they might all interfere with the standard of welfare which certain individuals have arbitrarily established to fit the occasion.