The long-suppressed anxiety of the people has changed into a heartrending sigh of anguish.  These words of a national poet express the general sentiment, “Better far than servitude a death upon the gallows.”  A vicious circle has been established.  The high-handed measures cause indignation, and the Governor-General is determined to suppress its expression.  There is no safety in Finland for honest and patriotic men.  The judiciary has been made subservient to General Bobrikoff.  Latest advices are ominous.  April 24, 1903, was a black day in the history of Finland.  It witnessed the inauguration of a reign of terror which, by the ordinance of April 2d and the rescript of April 9th, General Bobrikoff had been authorized to establish.

Bobrikoff returned to Finland with authority, if necessary, to close hotels, stores, and factories, to forbid general meetings, to dissolve clubs and societies, and to banish without legal process any one whose presence in the country he considered objectionable.

For 700 years Finns have been free men; now they have become Russian serfs, and it is well to make closer connections between the Finnish railway system and the trans-Siberian road.  Finns are long-suffering and patient, but who could endure all this?

While the expression of indignation is suppressed in Finland, outside of the Grand Duchy, especially in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Russia’s relentless tyranny has made the highest officers of state as resentful as the man in the street.  Indeed entire Scandinavia is aflame with indignation and apprehension.  The leading journals are warning Scandinavians “that the fate of Finland implies other tragedies of similar character, unless Pan-Scandinavia becomes something more than a political dream.”

VON PLEHVE[1]

[Footnote 1:  Reprinted by permission from the American Review of Reviews.]

In criticizing Russian policy in Finland a distinction should be made between its fundamental principles—­i.e., the ends which it is meant to attain, and its outward expression, which depends upon circumstances.

The former,—­i.e., the aims and principles, remain unalterable; the latter,—­i.e., the way in which this policy finds expression—­is of an incidental and temporary character, and does not always depend on the Russian authority alone.  This is what should be taken into consideration by Russia’s western friends when estimating the value of the information which reaches them from Finland.

As to the program of the Russian Government in the Finland question, it is substantially as follows: 

The fundamental problem of every supreme authority—­the happiness and prosperity of the governed—­can be solved only by the mutual cooperation of the government and the people.  The requirements presented to the partners in this common task are, on the one hand, that the people should recognize the unity of state principle and policy and the binding character of its aims; and, on the other, that the Government should acknowledge the benefit accruing to the state from the public activity, along the lines of individual development, of its component elements.