Germany is not after conquest, this trip; she is after food and fuel and supplies. A little south of Riga lie the Governments of Kovno, Vilna and Minsk, and a little south and west lies Russian Poland, already partially in German hands. I traveled through part of that country last summer and watched through the train windows vast fields of rye and wheat, and thousands of acres of potatoes. I did not see many sugar-beet fields, but they lie somewhere in that region—hundreds of thousands of acres of them, already harvested or waiting to be harvested. And Germany is hungry for those harvests.
There may be other reasons why Germany is pounding so desperately at the defenses of Riga. Not very far away, to the north, washed by the same Baltic Sea, lies the grand duchy of Finland, the one province of the Russian empire which has shown friendliness to Germany. Finland is also the one province which has already declared its unalterable determination not to belong further to the Russian empire. Finland wishes to set up a separate government and to be an independent state. At least the mass of the people, expressing themselves through a Socialist majority in the local Diet, has declared for this policy.
It would be tremendously to the advantage of Germany to have the big Russian empire split up into separate states, and the German government has worked assiduously to encourage the Finnish people in their secession policy. Finland is such a Mecca for German agents, and so many Finns are in the pay of these agents, that the provisional government last July practically shut the grand duchy off, marooned it, so to speak, from the rest of the empire. A traveler cannot go to Finland from Russia without special permission obtained from the war ministry. A resident of Petrograd could not go down to one of the numerous and charming Finnish seaside towns near the capital, even for a week-end visit, without such a permit. I have spent some time in Finland and know a great many people in Helsingfors, the capital. I tried to get a permit to stop in Helsingfors on my way out of Russia, but the war ministry refused to grant the permit.
When the traveler left Russia for England or the United States, for any country, for that matter, he had to take a certain train leaving Petrograd at 7.30 o’clock in the morning, and he left that train just once before he reached the frontier. That once is at Beli Ostrov, for the customs inspection. After that the traveler was a prisoner in his train until he reached Tornea, where he was finally inspected and convoyed across a narrow stretch of water to Sweden. That was the attitude of the Russian provisional government toward Finland.
The grand duchy is rightly considered one of the greatest menaces to the future integrity of the empire. It is rightly considered by Germany a hope for the future of Germany, and it may very well be that the German navy expects and hopes to follow up the conquest of the Baltic port of Riga with a conquest of the Baltic port of Helsingfors. Finland detests Russia to such an extent that she is apparently blind to the danger of a friendship with Germany. For fifty years she has hated and feared Russia, and she apparently cannot get it into her head that the thing she hated and feared has gone forever. I have observed this state of mind in Poles as well as Finns. They have hated Russia so long that they cannot stop all at once. The Finns have hated Russia so hard that they would not even look at the Russian soldiers quartered on them by the old government. I spent the winter of 1913 in Helsingfors, and it was one of the sights of the place to me to watch the Finns cut the Russians in the street every day. A regiment of Russians marched through the streets, bands playing, swords clanking, feet tramping, a gorgeous sight. But the soldiers might as well have been invisible phantoms for all the notice taken of them by the Finns. They walked quietly along, attending to their business, conversing or chatting with their neighbors, never looking at the Russians. In fact, it was a point of honor with the Finns never to look at a Russian. As for speaking to one, knowing him, inviting him to his house, a Finn who did such a thing would have been ostracized. Even the smallest children knew that.
This being the state of mind of the Finns, it is explainable in a measure why, in order to wring their independence from Russia now, they are willing to run a very great risk of being absorbed or badly exploited by the Germany of after the war. They became part of the Russian empire willingly, having been on very bad terms for a number of years with their old over-lord, Sweden. This was in 1801. Then the Czar made a solemn compact with Finland, both for himself and his heirs, that the country should have almost complete autonomy. It was to maintain its own army, which would never be called upon to serve on Russian soil, but should defend the Finnish coast and border in case Russia was involved in war.
Finland was to have her own coinage, postal systems, schools, courts, language and her own local diet. The Czar retained the right of vetoing legislation, the right to collect foreign customs and other imperial rights. Almost every promise made in that treaty has been broken by the czars of Russia, especially by Nicholas II, now in Siberia. This Nicholas tried to break the treaty altogether, abolish it, but the Finns were too intelligent, too clear-headed and too united to let him do it. Their resistance to his tyrannous treachery is a thrilling story in itself. Finland has never broken any part of her treaty with Russia, but now she wants to abolish the treaty. The contention is that the treaty was made with the czars of Russia, and, now that there are now no more czars, the treaty has ceased to hold good. Finland is full of German agents, and they must have invented this brilliant piece of reasoning and taught it to the Finnish Socialists. At all events, they must have fostered it with might and main, and perhaps the German navy believes that a visit to Helsingfors would convert the whole country to it.
There is even a better reason why the German navy has been pounding away in the Gulf of Finland, and why in the spring it will pound again. Germany seeks to separate still further Russia and her allies. There are only three ways by which Russia can communicate with Europe and America. One of these ways is across Siberia and the Pacific Ocean, a long distance. Another way, through Archangel, is a summer way only. The third and shortest way is through Finland and Sweden. If Germany can partially take Finland and seize the railroad which leads to Sweden, and there is only one main line of railroad, she can cut Russia off from her allies very effectively. Perhaps her next step would be to interfere, by means of submarines, with Russia’s other outlet in the Pacific.