mentary road to progress. It was fair to ask if comparable gains would have been possible for the people under foreign domination or under a state system other than a democratic one; since the answer was in the negative, devotion to their own form of government grew, and with it, a sense of responsibility for its preservation. The spirit of cooperation in laboring circles was only increased in the early 1930s, when the majority of bourgeois circles fought just as ardently on the same front for democracy against the supporters of dictatorship. The settlement of accounts of the civil war lay far in the past, and their tragic memories were fading. New problems came to the forefront and made both left and right forget the bad dream of the past.

For the working classes, the language question was not a significant one, but from the very beginning of the independence period it did cause deep controversy between the pro-Swedish and the pro-Finnish minded. According to the pro-Swedes, the developments as far as a national language were concerned were too rapid and detrimental to the cause of Swedish, while according to the pro-Finns the developments for the advancement of Finnish were too slow. In the language battle which ensued, stinging wounds were inflicted on minds sensitively nationalistic, and no one seemed to listen to arguments citing the fruitful cultural interaction the two languages had on each other. When the quarrel went beyond the borders of the country and Sweden meddled in it to support the Swedish-speaking Finns, the situation in the mid-1930s on this particular sector of the internal front was awkward, and it seemed impossible to settle the issue between them, let alone to get them to work together for any common cause.

But the human mind functions in such a way that it is constantly re-evaluating, and so in Finland too : the nation was faced with vast problems, questions concerning foreign policy that affected the very existence of the state, and before them internal problems had to move aside. With the collapse of the League of Nations, the Scandinavian countries turned to neutrality, to a policy of neutrality which did not, however, overlook military preparedness. From 1935 on, Finland tried to follow this Scandinavian foreign policy line, but it got no further than making declarations of neutrality; and when the quarrels between world communism and a national socialistic Germany, eager to expand, became more acute, all the countries of the north began to fall back upon the security that strengthened defense measures could bring them. The foreign policy of independent Finland was concerned only with the solution of one problem : the preservation

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