The excuse has been made that the Czar must be permitted to seek counsel with whomsoever he chooses in regard to the government of Finland.  But this is not a question of privately consulting one man or the other.  The new measure amounts to an official recognition of the Russian Council of Ministers as an organ of government exercising a powerful control over Finnish legislation, administration, and finance.  The center of gravity of Finnish administration has, in fact, been shifted from the Senate for Finland, composed of Finnish men, to the Russian Council of Ministers.

The Finnish Senate protested to the Czar in three separate memoranda, dated respectively June 19, 1908, December 22, 1908, and February 25,1909.  The Finnish Diet adopted on October 13, 1908, a petition to the Czar to reconsider the matter.  On the occasion of the opening of the Diet’s next session the Speaker, in his reply to the Czar’s message, briefly referred to the anxiety prevailing in Finland, with the result that the Diet was immediately punished by an order of dissolution from the Czar.  The Senate’s memoranda, as well as the Diet’s petition, were rejected, the Czar acting on the exclusive recommendation of the Russian Council of Ministers.  They were not even brought before him through the constitutional channels, the Finnish Secretary of State having been refused a hearing.  As a result all members of the Department of Justice, or half the number of the Senators, resigned.

In the same year another but less successful attack was made on the Finnish Constitution.  In the autumn of 1908 the Finnish Diet adopted a new Landlord and Tenant Bill, but before it was brought up for the Czar’s sanction the Diet was dissolved in the manner just described.  The Bill being of a pressing nature, the Council of Ministers was at last prevailed upon to report on it to the Czar.  The latter then gave his sanction to it, but, on the recommendation of the Council, added a rider in the preamble.  This was to the effect that, though the Bill, having been adopted by a Diet which was dissolved before the expiration of the three years’ period for which it was elected, should not have been presented for his consideration at all, the Czar would nevertheless make an exception from the rule and sanction it, prompted by his regard for the welfare of the poorer part of the population.

The Senate decided to postpone promulgation of this law in view of the constitutional doctrine involved in the preamble.  It was pointed out that this doctrine was entirely foreign to Finnish law.  The preamble which, according to custom, should have contained nothing beyond the formal sanction to the law in question, embodied an interpretation of constitutional law.  Such an interpretation could only legally be made in the same manner as the enactment of a constitutional law, i.e., through the concurrent decision of the Sovereign and the Diet.  The Senate, therefore, petitioned the Czar to modify the preamble in such a way as to remove from it what could be construed as an interpretation of constitutional law.