decision is practically taken when the Finnish Secretary is permitted
an audience.

This important measure was brought about by the exclusive
recommendation of Russian Ministers. Neither the Finnish Diet nor the
Senate nor the Secretary of State for Finland, who resides in St.
Petersburg, was consulted or had the slightest idea of what was going
on before the Protocol was published in Russia. It has never been
promulgated in Finland, and no Finnish authority has been officially
advised of it. The whole matter has been treated as a private affair
between the Czar and his Russian Ministers.

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