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I admired the appearance of the Baltic Sea, which evidently seemed to have been introduced between those countries by the sudden splitting of the land, and that originally Sweden was united to the western coast of Denmark; in short, the whole interstice of the Gulf of Finland had no being, until these countries, by mutual consent, separated from one another.
The fame of their sovereign excited in the nation an enthusiastic sense of their own importance; proud of their king, the peasant in Finland and Gothland joyfully contributed his pittance; the soldier willingly shed his blood; and the lofty energy which his single mind had imparted to the nation long survived its creator.
But recent years have revealed a subtle change of attitude. The policy of Russification had not been abandoned; indeed in Finland and the Ukraine it survived in its most odious form. But it was none the less possible to detect a growing note of interrogation even among the bureaucracy, and still more an increasing movement of impatient protest on the part of thinking Russians.
Then they fought without delay: Alrik was killed, and Erik was most severely wounded; it was hard to find remedies, and he did not for long time recover health. Frode straightway made him king of the nations he had subdued, and also granted to him Helsingland with the two Laplands, Finland and Esthonia, under a yearly tribute.
In the early part of the eighteenth century there was a remarkable manifestation of sea-power in the Baltic. Peter the Great, having created an efficient army, drove the Swedes from the coast provinces south of the Gulf of Finland. Like the earlier monarchies of which we have spoken, Russia, in the Baltic at least, now became a naval state.
Such are the grounds on which the government and the people should unite in the performance of their common task. The combination of imperial unity with local autonomy, of autocracy with self-government, forms the principle which must be taken into consideration in judging the action of the Russian Government in the Grand Duchy of Finland.
The officers of the Finnish Army were to be Finns, and this army could not be called upon to serve outside of the Grand Duchy. This was the first fundamental right of the Finns to be attacked by the Russian Government. In some mysterious way the very insignificant army of Finland "interfered with the general welfare of the Russian Empire."
Whether he originated this iniquity or not is uncertain; but when, in 1892, I first saw the new Russian cathedral rising on the heights above Helsingfors, a structure vastly more imposing than any warranted by the small number of the "orthodox" in Finland, with its architecture of the old Muscovite type, symbolical of fetishism, I could not but recognize his hand in it.
Could Bernadotte, a Swede by adoption, prefer the alliance of an ambitious sovereign whose vengeance he had to fear, and who had sanctioned the seizure of Finland to that of a powerful monarch, his formidable neighbour, his protector in Sweden, and where hostility might effectually support the hereditary claims of young Gustavus?
Bernadotte himself told me so several times, and added that he had Napoleon's order to declare war against Russia." And afterward, during almost a century, Finland never occasioned any worries, political or economic, to the Russian Government, and did not require special sacrifices or special solicitude on its part.
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