The Russians have taken pains to make Helsingfors’ strong, strategic position, impregnable from the military point of view. The entrance to the inner harbor is so narrow that only one ship at a time can pass between the frowning rocks, and the murderous guns of the forts are so mounted that they can be turned against the foe, whether he approach by land or sea.
A little way out from the inner harbor is a scattered group of frowning, rocky islands fortified with the latest type of death-dealing cannon. At the time of the Crimean War both France and England mustered their fleets to take one of these islands, but found it impossible. To-day it would be a still more difficult task.
If poverty makes strange bedfellows, international complications and affiances make still stranger chums. Here are the bitter enemies of sixty years ago hobnobbing together in these days of the Entente cordiale. Republican France, constitutional Britain, and autocratic, reactionary Russia, “as thick as thieves” (no opprobrious implication intended), and working together with all the wiles and all the might of diplomacy to offset and hold in check the Triple Alliance.
Speaking of politics and government, I would modestly recommend both the suffragettes and the anti-suffragettes of England to study the experience of Finland in regard to this burning subject. Here is the only European country that totally ignores the word “male” in its suffrage regulations. Every adult has a vote, and, as fifty-three per cent of the inhabitants are women, they hold the much-dreaded balance of power which is such a bugbear to the “antis” of Great Britain.
Fish Harbor, Helsingfors.
Here is a country that is theoretically ruled by women, and yet there has been no tremendous cataclysm of the forces of nature. The sun rises and sets in Finland just as it used to do. People buy and sell and get gain, fall in love, are married and given in marriage, die and are buried, just as in the olden days. Theoretically the women could tip every man out of his parliamentary seat and run the government to suit themselves, but, strange to say, there are only seventeen women in the Finnish Diet. Less than one tenth of all the members belong to the terrible window-smashing sex, and one writer says of these seventeen: “They are mostly of middle age, grave, and even portentously solemn. They are apparently proof against all temptations of vanity. They dress with Quakerish simplicity and are completely absorbed in their duties.”
Whether it is due to the influence of woman or not, Finland is an exceedingly orderly and well-governed country, and it would be ruled still better did not the medieval government at St. Petersburg veto various measures relating to education and morals which would be for the welfare of the country. For instance, as I told you before, the Diet wants a larger measure of the prohibition of intoxicants, which the Czar has forbidden. The Diet has voted for compulsory education, which the imperial Romanoff, “with and by the consent of his ministers,” has also disallowed.
Nevertheless, in spite of this handicap Finland is in many respects the most progressive and best educated nation in Europe. Let the woman suffragists get what comfort they can from these facts, and let the suffragettes remember that in getting “votes for women” in Finland not a single bomb was exploded, or a house burned to the ground, or a single window broken by a wild and whirling female.
Until very recently there have been four estates in the Diet of Finland: Nobles, Clergy, Burghers, and Peasants. In the last-named house Finland was entirely unique. I have never heard of another nation that had a “House of Peasants” to legislate for it, but it must be remembered that many of these so-called peasants are very substantial farmers, and that their power in a country like Finland is paramount, as it ought to be.