ot permit Sweden, whose people are bound to
us by ties of blood and friendship, by the hospitality which we
offered to every Swedish immigrant, to be ranged among our
enemies by the German-admiring aristocrats of Sweden who by
birth, training and education are opposed to democracy, who hope,
if Germany wins, to gain as great an ascendancy in the government
as the Prussian Junkers possess in Germany.

* * * * *

The Finns who occupy that part of Russia nearest to Sweden have
quite a sympathy for the Swedes, Finland having been at one time
a part of Sweden. The races, however, are not the same. The Finns
are a Mongolian race and certain similarities of language make it
plain that the Finns and the Hungarians came from the same
mysterious place of origin somewhere in the great mountains and
highlands of Central Asia.

Three languages, three influences, fight for mastery in Finland.
The official Russian, the language of the government; Finnish,
now receiving a new lease of life; and Swedish, the language of
those who once conquered and held Finland, and who so imposed
their civilisation on the more ignorant Finns, that to-day
Swedish is the language of the more prosperous classes and of
most of the business men.

The women of Finland received the suffrage in 1906, all voting
who are over twenty-four and who have been for five years
citizens of Finland. Many women thereafter were elected to the
Finnish parliament.

In two Scandinavian countries the women vote. Norway was the
first sovereign state of Europe to give full citizenship rights
to women. In 1913, all Norwegian women of twenty-five and
citizens for five years were put on a voting equality with men,
and the only positions under the national government for which
women are not eligible are in the army and navy, the diplomatic
and consular service and the Supreme Court.

The Danish women received the full franchise in 1915, but in
aristocratic Sweden only the women paying income taxes have
rights in the communal councils.

In 1908, in Norway, a law was passed providing that women doing
the work of men shall receive equal pay.

Military service in all three northern nations is universal and
compulsory.

Possibly on a "tip" from Berlin to a fellow autocrat, there
occurred in February, 1914, an extraordinary political event,
arranged and "accelerated" by the Government, when thirty
thousand farmers, meeting in Stockholm for the