The word went forth for the "Russification" of Finland. After picking a quarrel with the Diet on the military question, the Tsar on February 18, 1899, issued a manifesto suspending the Finnish Constitution and abolishing the Diet. Finland became with a stroke of the pen a department of the Russian Empire. A rigorous Press censorship was established, the hated governor-general Bobrikoff filled the country with gendarmes and spies, native officials were dismissed or driven to resign, an attempt was made to introduce the Russian language into the schools, and, though the Finns could only oppose a campaign of passive resistance to these wicked and short-sighted measures, at the end of seven years the nation which had for almost a century been the most contented portion of the Tsar's dominions was seething with ill-feeling and disloyalty. The inevitable outcome was the assassination of General Bobrikoff by a young student in June 1904; and when the Russian universal strike took place in October 1905, the entire Finnish nation joined in as one man. Finland regained her liberties for a time, and immediately set to work putting her house in order by substituting for her old mediaeval constitution a brand new one, based on universal suffrage, male and female, and employing such up-to-date devices as proportional representation. The only result of seven years' "Russification" was the creation of a united democracy, with a strong socialistic leaven, in place of a nation governed by an antiquated aristocratic Diet, and divided into two hostile political camps on the question whether Swedish or Finnish should be the language of the national culture. But the fortunes of Finland were accidentally but inextricably bound up with those of the party of reform in Russia, and when the bureaucracy, after the downfall of the revolutionaries, found itself once more firmly seated in the saddle, it returned to the attack on the Finnish Constitution, not indeed with the open and brutal methods of Bobrikoff, but by gradual and insidious means no less effective. And it must be admitted that the Russian Duma, as "reformed" by Stolypin, so far from being of any help to Finland in the struggle, has been made the instrument of the destruction of her liberties.