so mean and
meager and the houses for the most part built of wood, I saw on every
hand the disastrous result of the attempted Russification of the
country. The hand of the oppressor, that official sent from Petersburg
to crush and to conquer, was upon the honest Finnish nation. The Russian
bureaucracy was trying to destroy its weaker but more successful
neighbor, and in order to do so employed the harshest and most
unscrupulous officials it could import.

My fellow-traveler from Stockholm, who represented a firm of
paper-makers in Hamburg, and who paid an annual visit to Abo and
Helsingfors, acted as my guide around the town, while I awaited the
information from the humbled Chief of Police. My German friend pointed
out to me how, since Russia placed her hand upon Finland, progress had
been arrested, and certainly plain evidences were on every hand. There
was growing discontent everywhere, for many of the newspapers had
recently been suppressed and the remainder were under a severe
censorship; agriculture had already decreased, and many of the
cotton-spinning and saw mills were silent and deserted. The exploitation
of those gigantic forests from which millions of trunks were floated
down to the sea annually had now been suspended, the great landowners
were deserting the country, and there was silence and depression
everywhere. Finland had been separated for economic purposes from the
more civilized countries, and bound to the poverty-stricken,
artificially isolated and oppressed Russia. The double-headed eagle was
everywhere, and the people sat silent and brooding beneath its black
shadow.

"There will be an uprising here before long," declared the German
confidentially, as we were taking tea one day on the wooden balcony of
the hotel where the sea and the low-lying islands stretched out before
us in the pale yellow of the autumn sundown. "The people will revolt, as
they did in Poland. The Finnish Government can only appeal to the Czar
through the Governor-General, and one can easily imagine that their
suggestions never reach the Emperor. It is said here that the harsher
and more corrupt the official, the greater honor does he receive from
Petersburg. But trouble is brewing for Russia," he added. "A very
serious trouble--depend upon it."

I looked upon the gray dismal scene, the empty port, the silent quay,
the dark line of gloomy pine forest away beyond the town, the broken
coast and the wide expanse of water glitte