latviski
Our trip to Finland will be comfortable and pleasant; for Finland is prepared to welcome and to aid the visitor. The government here has not, as in the other Baltic Republics, been suddenly built up out of nothing, by inexperienced peasants. The Finns of Finland have maintained some degree of personal independence and separate nationality for centuries. They represent a greater purity of race than any other people we shall meet in eastern Europe. They are an Asiatic people, like their cousins the Esthonians, and we can still see among them some trace of the flat face and slanted eye of their remote ancestry. So long, however, have they dwelt apart in their present bleak and icy land, and so fully have they absorbed the civilization of the West, that they are far more European than Asiatic. Or rather, they are individual; they are unique; they are Finns. The many immigrants of this race who have come to our own shores in recent years, have taught us that they are an industrious, thrifty and unusually honest race, though with something of the unsentimental hardness so marked in the Esthonians.
From Reval, the Esthonian capital, we shall take steamer, a regular ocean steamer, across the Gulf of Finland to the Finnish capital of
Helsingfors, which lies almost exactly opposite. The distance is only
about a hundred miles; but a hundred miles of icy water may mean much
Helsingfors, as we approach it, gives much the effect of an up-to-date American city. It has large modern houses, a few tall buildings, a number of recent churches, and a huge new Protestant cathedral which towers rather grandly above the neat and pleasant looking town. Helsingfors, however, like the other Baltic cities we have just visited, has been inherited by its present inhabitants, rather than created by them. Eight hundred years ago the Finns were almost wholly uncivil- ized; and the Swedes, coming among them as merchants, built trading cities on their coast, and assumed to some extent the government of the land. In the icy interior, the Finns retained their full independence; and when in later centuries the Russians overthrew the Swedes, Finland still remained unabsorbed by her new conquerors. She accepted Russian gov- ernors, but remained an independent duchy under the personal rule of the Russian Czar. The Finns had learned self-government under Russia; and so when Russia's breakdown came in the World War, they were fully ready to take care of themselves in modern fashion. Helsingfors saw some terrific scenes, it is true. We may still trace the marks of cannon and the brand of fire upon her public buildings. Some of the more reckless Finns joined with the Russian Bolshevists against their conservative fellow countrymen. Each side expressed its rage against the other in savage vengeances. Captured prisoners were buried in the ice to freeze; and each party sought to wreck the regions held by the other. From this desolation, the land has recovered swiftly. The true Finnish temperament of caution and shrewd common-sense now reigns, and there are few republics which are today so ably governed.
We shall be struck by the careful cleanness of the streets of Helsingfors, and by the fact that the women seem doing so much of the outdoors
work, even the house building. Countless bicycles, ridden as often by
women as by men, dash about us in every direction. Indeed this is the
one modern land where the two sexes seem really and flatly on a complete equality. The male bicyclist no more thinks of getting out of the
way of the female rider than she of getting out of his. In the old Russian days, the Finnish Congress contained several women members
before women were thus holding office in any other land; and today this
Congress holds a larger proportion of women than any other such body
in the world. To the Finns the right and the ability of women thus to
The Finnish fishermen roam far across the Baltic and are often long away from wives and home.
We shall see many Swedes upon the streets of Helsingfors. They are easily distinguishable by their greater size and their Teutonic features. They still form nearly a tenth part of Finland's three million people; and as they dwell wholly in the neighborhood of the cities they appear to the visitor even more numerous. Russians too, though no longer very welcome, still linger in numbers about Helsingfors. Next to this quiet, well-conducted capital, the chief coast town of Finland is Abo, which stands at the mouth of both the Finnish Gulf and the great Gulf of Bothnia which here reaches far into the Arctic north. Abo is the oldest town of the country, and the Castle of Abo was once the chief stronghold of Sweden, her frontier defense and menace against Russia. It is a huge square squat fortress, wholly out of date, but still facing the sea with a picturesque air of defiance. The cathedral of Abo is also a mighty structure, built of brick over six centuries ago and seemingly fit to last forever. It contains the tombs of several noted Swedes and also of several Scottish soldiers who here fought for Sweden in her day of power.
The real land of the Finns, which extends for hundreds of miles back from the coast towns, is so different from the partly Swedish partly Russian coast region, or indeed from any land we have seen before, that there will be much to interest us in its depths. The Finns themselves call their country "the land of the thousand lakes." They might well call it also "the land of the thirty thousand islands." That number have been counted along its rugged broken sea-shore, without reckoning the other thousands of islets which dot the endless lakes.
Finland in fact will strike the seasoned traveller as a land geologically unfinished. It seems to belong to an earlier age than the rest of
Europe; it has hardly yet been made ready to be the dwelling place of
man. Other lands, the geologists tell us, must many of them have gone
through what Finland is now experiencing. They must once have been
widely covered with shallow water like these Finnish lakes. But in
Finland the lakes have not yet had time to drain away, and as we
venture back into the country, we find their waters blocking our progress
in all directions. Roads, indeed, are almost useless here, though the
government faithfully labors to clear them of the ice and snow. In the
few hot summer months, men have found it easier to travel by boat
along the waterways of the lakes; and even in the long frozen winters,
Some of these water routes will show us striking scenes. A few curious huntsmen make their way even to this far-off region; and these return to their homes with enthusiastic descriptions of its strange and unusual beauty. For one thing, if we come in summer, we shall find the endless Arctic daylight almost completely enfolding us with its weird light. We can only sleep by securing in our hotel a room with heavy curtains, so as to shut out the night light. The Finns have a legend that twilight and dawn are two lovers always struggling to embrace, always coming closer and closer. In Helsingfors they almost reach each other's arms in the fair month of June; but only in the peace and quiet that reigns in the far north of Finland can they break the narrow bond of shadow that still separates them.
If we could see the land in winter, we should find the reverse condition true. A brief, reluctant dawning and setting of the sun at midday
is all that breaks the chill and silent night that spreads over the entire
country. Then the vast forests of huge pine trees enclose within their
deeps an impenetrable darkness, so that even the wolves come out to
You must see these silent, frozen waters, with their encircling band of pine trees, if you are to appreciate them. We will take a modern little steamer which runs up one of the many canals cut to connect the inland waters with the sea. The largest of these lakes, Ladoga, is not in Finnish territory, but forms the eastern boundary separating the land from Russia. It is unlike the strictly Finnish lakes; for it is a broad and open expanse of quiet waters but little above the level of the sea. It is, in fact, the final basin into which most of the waters of the upper lakes discharge themselves. The great truly Finnish lake is Saima. This is a shallow, far-extending labyrinth of channels winding amid hills and islets. It is the undisputed kingdom of the forest gods. Deep within its recesses we may visit Nyslott, a sort of Finnish Venice, a summer resort for fishermen, with its houses built on many tiny islands. It possesses an old gray castle, erected by the Finns themselves to be the guardian of this water entrance to their land.
Most celebrated of the sights of Saima is its outlet, by which all these gathered waters from a thousand miles rush down to Lake Ladoga. The stream has but a few miles to descend some hundreds of feet, and the first part of this passage is made with a swift rush that makes the swollen waters seem a single roaring rapid. Nowhere else in the world is there a mountain river of such volume and such speed. The rapids below our own Niagara carry a larger volume, but over a much lesser descent. The chief plunge of all is known as the cataract of Imatra. It is, however, scarcely a cataract at all in our sense of the word, for there is no perpendicular fall of the water; there is only a long slant in the swiftly plunging current, a mad roaring and tumult where rocks interpose, and a terrible arrow-like swiftness of smooth water in the open spaces. There are several such rapids as this in Finland built on a smaller scale; and the Finns have learned to descend the others, and will take tourists down them in a boat for a price, just as we do in more sophisticated lands. But no one has ever shot the mighty rapids of Imatra. At their narrowest point they rush between granite cliffs scarcely fifty feet apart. They deafen us with their tumult; they awe us with their speed and power. Of all the sights of Europe, this is one of the most unforgetable. Many a time you will see again in your dreams the mad rush of the waters of Imatra.
Beyond Lake Saima, let us traverse the country yet farther northward.
The quiet, sturdy, solid capital city of Finland has many such scenes as this. The public square without a single idler! © Ewing Galloway, New York
The dwellers here are hunters as much as farmers. The cleared lands are less numerous than the forests, and the people do not dwell in villages, but each on his little homestead with his fields marked off by railed fences like our own, and his cattle more carefully sheltered than the human beings. The houses are much like our own log cabins of the old frontier, but in some places we can still find the even more primitive aboriginal Finnish house called a kota. It is built like a wooden tent, a circle of slanting poles are set leaning against a living central tree.
Let us venture yet farther north; for Finland extends high up beyond the Arctic circle. The houses and the people disappear. Even the forests fail us here, and all ordinary vegetation is gone. We reach the "tundras," the vast plains of the extreme north. Nothing grows here but mosses and lichens, those strange little persistent growths which seem to rise from death itself to champion the eternal principle of life. Yet even here a race of human beings dwell. They are the Lapps, perhaps the aboriginal race of Europe, driven northward by a thousand later races, until now only a few hundred of them, in ever dwindling numbers, roam the desolate tundras. We have seen these Lapps already in our Norwegian trip. Their sole source of existence is the reindeer. Herds of these live by eating the mosses of the tundra, and the Lapps guide them over the great waste to where fresh mosses can be found. From this freezing land of desolation we may well hurry back to the comparative warmth of southern Finland. On our way we shall stop to note the manufactures, which are being developed in the interior to make use of the enormous water power. Chief of these little factory towns is Tammerfors, somewhat boastfully called "the Manchester of Finland." If Finland is to prosper, as her people seem so energetically to desire, it must be by means of manufactures; for the farmers cannot produce food sufficient even for the present thinly scattered population. Hence the very necessaries of life must be imported here, and Finland must pay for these through the development of her one great natural resource — her water power.
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