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at Tammerfors only 100,000, etc. In like manner, the working men began to demand full pay from their employers for the strike days. It was extortion on a grand scale.
Such was the condition of affairs when the month of
December
came. Immediately on the morning of the 1st the newspaper-readers had a fresh sensation: Seven armed men in plain clothes had escorted two goods vans packed full of fire-arms across the frontier; they prevented all examination, failed to show any papers whatever, but saw to it that the vans reached their destination—the towns Kuopio and Lahti, where the contents were unloaded and taken to the houses of the working-men's club in the charge of a guard. This was the first of the many batches of fire-arms which arrived from Russia in the course of the month. The corps of the Red Guard had tasted blood, and the rifles they had employed during the general strike had for the greater part been borrowed of the Russians, and had to be given back again. Instead, the kind Russian Bolsheviks, who in meeting after meeting had proclaimed the principle of self-determination for the peoples, and specially laid stress upon the right of Finland to full independence being as plain as day, now sent any amount of weapons and ammunition to the corps of the Red Guard, whose task it was to crush the Finnish parties which were really in earnest about the right of self-determination. The customs and railway authorities lodged one objection after another but could do nothing, as they lacked all means of power. Thus the Russians distributed arms to the corps of the Red Guard throughout the country. Not only rifles and cartridges arrived, but also machine-guns—at the very least about a hundred. As the Russian military were
