The meeting was opened by a man who laid stress on the necessity of a Constituent Assembly. The speeches succeeded one another. Students climbed up into the pine-trees and on the roof of the proscenium. Others lay on the grass behind the crowd. “Land and Liberty” was the burden of the speeches. There was nothing new or striking said. The hackneyed commonplaces were rolled out one after another. Indignation, threats, menaces, blood and thunder. And all the time the sun shone hotter and “all Nature looked smiling and gay.” The audience applauded, but no fierceness of invective, no torrent of rhetoric managed to make the meeting a serious one. Nature is stronger than speeches, and sunshine more potent than rant. It is true the audience were enjoying themselves; but they were enjoying the outing, and the speeches were an agreeable incidental accompaniment; they enjoyed the attacks on the powers that be, as the Bank-holiday maker enjoys Aunt Sally at the seaside. Some Finns spoke in Russian and Finnish, and then M. Aladin, the prominent member of the Duma, made a real speech. As he rose he met with an ovation. M. Aladin is of peasant extraction. He passed through the University in Russia, emigrated to London, was a dock labourer, a printer’s devil, a journalist, an electrical engineer, a teacher of Russian; he speaks French and German perfectly, and English so well that he speaks Russian with a London accent. M. Aladin has, as I have said, a great contempt for the methods of the Russian revolutionaries, and he expressed something of it on this occasion. He said that only people without any stuff in them would demand a Constituent Assembly. “You don’t demand a Constituent Assembly, you constitute it,” he said. “It was humiliating,” he continued, “that citizens of a big country like Russia should be obliged to come to Finland in order to speak their minds freely. It was time to cease being a people of slaves, and time to be a revolutionary people. The Russian people would never be free until they showed by their acts that they meant to be free.” M. Aladin speaks without any gesticulation. He is a dark, shortish man, with a small moustache and grey serious eyes, short hair, and a great command of incisive mordant language. His oratory is, as I have said before, English in style. On this occasion it was particularly nervous and pithy. He did not, however, succeed in turning that audience of holiday-makers into a revolutionary meeting. The inhabitants of the villas clapped. The young ladies in large hats chortled with delight. It was a glorious picnic; an ecstatic game of Aunt Sally. And when the interval came the public rushed to the restaurants. There was one on the sea-shore, with a military band playing. There was a beach and a pier and boats and bathers. Here was the true inwardness of the meeting. Many people remained on the beach for the rest of the afternoon. The Social Democrats who had been present were displeased with M. Aladin’s speech.