This is what is the matter with the transportation system in Russia. It is the reason why the people of Petrograd, Moscow and other cities will go cold and hungry this winter, one reason why the death rate of children and old people, already appallingly large, will grow more appalling within the next few months; one reason, and a very strong one, why order has not been restored in Russia. High as are the prices of all food and manufactured articles, the working people, as a class, have money enough to pay for them, and not until the merchants’ stocks are completely gone and the weather gets too cold to stand in line long hours in order to buy will the purblind workers realize their situation. Not until then will they realize what their selfishness and cruel folly have done to themselves and the entire working class of the country. So struck was I by the scarceness of goods in the shops and the soaring prices of almost every article that I went to the Minister of Labor and asked him to tell me something of industrial conditions of the country. I was not entirely ignorant of those conditions. I knew, for example, that Russia is not exclusively an agricultural country, that, on the contrary, her development as a manufacturing country has been going on by leaps and bounds, especially in the last dozen years. Russia has a proletariat and a factory system, although not quite as large proportionately as those of the United States. Her iron industry, her cotton mills, her machine shops are enormous and in normal times they are wonderfully productive. After the suppressed revolution of 1905-06 important reforms in the land laws were enacted, and for the first time the peasants were given their lands in fee simple. That is, they were given an opportunity in certain circumstances to take title to their share in communal lands. This gave them an opportunity to sell if they chose, and a large number of peasant artisans did sell their lands, moved into the cities and became factory workers. Before this time the factory workers had more or less alternated between town and rural life.