Moreover, as soon as Russia succeeds in obtaining more freedom, a further growth of her industries will immediately follow. Technical education--which, strange to say, was for a long time systematically suppressed by the Government--would rapidly grow and spread; and in a few years, with her natural resources and her laborious youth, which even now tries to combine workmanship with science, Russia would see her industrial powers increase tenfold. She _farà da sè_ in the industrial field. She will manufacture all she needs; and yet she will remain an agricultural nation. At the present time only a little more than 1,500,000 men and women, out of the 112,000,000 strong population of European Russia, work in manufactures, and 7,500,000 combine agriculture with manufacturing. This figure may treble without Russia ceasing to be an agricultural nation; but if it be trebled, there will be no room for imported manufactured goods, because an agricultural country can produce them cheaper than those countries which live on imported food. Let us not forget that in the United Kingdom 1,087,200 persons, all taken, are employed in _all_ the textile industries of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, and that _only_ 300,000 out of them are males above eighteen years of age (311,000 in 1907); that these workpeople keep going 53,000,000 spindles and more than 700,000 looms in the cotton factories only; and that the yearly production of textiles during the last few years was so formidable that it represented a value of £200,000,000, and that the average value of textiles exported every year attained £136,257,500 in 1905-1910--to say nothing of the £163,400,000 reached in the extraordinary year of 1911.[10] * * * * * The same is still more true with regard to other European nations, much more advanced in their industrial development, and especially with regard to Germany. So much has been written about the competition which Germany offers to British trade, even in the British markets, and so much can be learned about it from a mere inspection of the London shops, that I need not enter into lengthy details. Several articles in reviews; the correspondence exchanged on the subject in _The Daily Telegraph_ in August, 1886; numerous consular reports, regularly summed up in the leading newspapers, and still more impressive when consulted in originals; and, finally, political speeches, have familiarised the public opinion of this country with the importance and the powers of German competition.[11] Moreover, the forces which German industry borrows from the technical training of her workmen, engineers and numerous scientific men, have been so often discussed by the promoters of technical education in England that the sudden growth of Germany as an industrial power can be denied no more.