[6] Report of Vice-Consul Green, _The Economist_, 9th June, 1894:
“Reapers of a special type, sold at £15 to £17, are durable and go
through more work than either the English or the American reapers.”
In the year 1893, 20,000 reaping machines, 50,000 ploughs, and so on,
were sold in that district only, representing a value of £822,000.
Were it not for the simply prohibitive duties imposed upon foreign
pig-iron (two and a half times its price in the London market), this
industry would have taken a still greater development. But in order
to protect the home iron industry--which consequently continued
to cling to obsolete forms in the Urals--a duty of 61s. a ton of
imported pig-iron was levied. The consequences of this policy for
Russian agriculture, railways and State’s budget have been discussed
in full in a work by A. A. Radzig, _The Iron Industry of the World_.
St. Petersburg, 1896 (Russian).
[7] Out of the 1,500 steamers which ply on Russian rivers one-quarter
are heated with naphtha, and one-half with wood; wood is also the
chief fuel of the railways and ironworks in the Urals.
[8] The output was, in 1910, 24,146,000 tons in European Russia, and
1,065,000 tons in Siberia.
[9] See Appendix C.
[10] Here are the figures obtained by the official census of 1908. In
all the cotton industry, only 220,563 men (including boys), 262,245
women, and 90,061 girls less than eighteen years old were employed.
They produced 6,417,798,000 yards of unbleached gray, and 611,824,000
yards of bleached white and coloured cottons--that is, 160 yards
per head of population--and 1,507,381,000 lb. of yarn, valued
£96,000,000. We have thus 12,271 yards of cotton, and 2,631 lb. of
yarn per person of workpeople employed. For woollens and worsted
there were 112,438 men and boys, 111,492 women, and 34,087 girls
under eighteen. The value (incomplete) of the woven goods was about
£40,250,000, and that of the yarn about £21,000,000. These figures
are most instructive, as they show how much man can produce with the
present machinery. Unfortunately, the real productivity in a modern
factory is not yet understood by the economists. Thus, we saw lately
Russian economists very seriously maintaining that it was necessary
to “proletarize” the peasants (about 100,000,000) in order to create
a great industry. We see now that if one-fourth, or even one-fifth,
part only of the yearly increase of the population took to industry
(as it has done in Germany), Russian factories would soon produce
such quantities of all sorts of manufactured goods, that they would
be able to supply with them 400 or 500 million people, in addition to
the population of the Russian Empire.
[11] Many facts in point have also been collected in a little book,
_Made in Germany_, by E. E. Williams. Unhappily, the facts relative
to the recent industrial development of Germany are so often used
in a partisan spirit in order to promote protection that their real
importance is often misunderstood.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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