abroad to return home. Nevertheless, agents of revolution continued to work in secret, inciting and spreading discontent, but since incitement alone was not enough to achieve results the revolutionaries began to make use of an extreme weapon, assassination: in March 1881, Alexander II himself met his death at the hands of revolutionary assassins.

In Finland the news of Alexander's death was received with a feeling of deep shock. The dead monarch was remembered chiefly as a man who had respected and revitalized the constitutional basis of Finland, and furthermore as a man who, from the Finnish nationalistic point of view, had taken a favorable attitude toward attempts to foster the use of the Finnish language. He was said to have favored conditions leading to a more free economic life, and during his reign the Finnish monetary unit, the markka, had been given a firm basis by a liberating of the economy. All in all, then, the reign of Alexander II had meant a time of intellectual and material advances for Finland, and so the Finns have given his reign a different interpretation from what the Russians have, and he has remained closer to the Finns than has any other Grand Duke of Finland. When his reign was followed by a period of gloom, his memory only seemed to grow brighter, and its visible sign was the monument the Finns erected to him in 1894 in Helsinki.

A characteristic of Finnish history during the period of autonomy has been that changes in reigns generally did not bring rapid, sharp changes in political conditions. The new monarchs regularly followed the main lines of policy laid down by their predecessors. Thus the first period of Alexander III's reign (beginning with the customary guarantees, which for the time being assured the legal status of Finland) forms an organic continuation of his father's policies, but in the government of Russia itself, bureaucracy began to compete with this policy of selfdetermination. There began a relentless campaign against those revolutionary movements and reforms considered dangerous which had been instituted by the previous Czar. Finnish self-government seemed to be one of these dangerous reforms, since the country rapidly seemed to assume national, unique characteristics. This resulted in bitter attacks, first in the press, then in `scientific' literature, against the foundations of the Finnish state, and these attacks assumed serious proportions in the latter half of Alexander III's reign. Factors in the russification policy were the needs of absolutism, bureaucracy with its own goals, and a national mania which in foreign policy led to Panslavism, in the attempt to unite

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