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