FREE' FINLAND.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIV, Issue 13414, 16 February 1907, Page 5 (Supplement)

FREE' FINLAND.

TRIUMPHS OF DEMOCRACY

Taking the half-past ten p.m. train from St. Petersburg, you undress and lie dawn in a comfortable sleeping-car and awake the next morning at nine -o'clock to find Tourself in Helsingfors, the capital of Fnland. What a wonderful change in every respect! Instead of the huge, dreary, Russian capital, built upon bogs and swamps, with its shapeless barracks, its beggars and drunkards, its police, patrols, and officers walking everywhere with the bearing of conquerors, with its drumhead courts-martial and acts of terrorisminstead of all this you find yourself in an atmosphere of the most developed Western civilisation, revealing everywhere the tokens of vigour and youthful freshness.

You will find,in Helsingfors no beggars, no symptoms of striking poverty. The streets are neat, the houses of original and picturesque architecture, the whole town with its cosy gardens and squares is charmingly situated on rocks intersected in every direction by the bracing sea, with a fringe of clusters of tiny islands and fjords. Every small apartment, every shop is titted with its telephone, electric light, and heating appliances of the latest pattern. The tradesmen, shopkeepers, working men bear in their faces the consciousness of the security of labour and life. They lack the hungry, hunted look which characterises the whole population of Russia. You feel everywhere here, in the very life of the country, the spirit of freedom, of unrestrained buoyancy, as if it were borne in upon the breath of the surrounding sea.

It is twelve months only since the people of Finland became free again, after seven long years of the Bobrikoff regime. The Finninsh nation enjoys freedom of speech, of meeting, of social and political activity. And during this twelve months of self-go-vernment and freedom it has worked out for itself the most democratic organisation of Parliament in the world. Universal suffrage exists for men and women alike, each sex possessing the right not only of electing but of sitting in Parliament. Parliament consists of a single Chamber, provided, however, with a special committee adapted to check any undue rashness in legislation. Universal suffrage is cleverly combined with proportional representation. During these last twelve months the country has made astonishing progress in commerce and industry, in the development of co-operation, in the villages even more than in the towns.

Next -March (he elections for the new Diet will take place. The new Finnish Diet, based upon the most democratic principles, will begin to legislate for the welfare of the country. 'the women have already several candidates in the field, determined in the first session of the Diet to pass a Bill for the prohibition of the sale of alcoholic liquor in the towns, its sale being already forbidden in the villages. The Senate, which is the Finnish Cabinet of Ministers, is working out a number of beneficial reforms to be submitted to the deliberation of the first Diet.

" Every branch of the administration is preparing important Bills," said Senator Dormer. Minister for Education. Bills for workmen's compensation for accident, for the reform of primary education, and local self-government,'and. above all. for revision of the relations between the Tsar and the Diet. Bills, though Cautious and moderate, yet intended to seriously forward the progress of the country.''