The most important industry is the manufacture of clothing and wearing apparel, which employed more than one-third of the Jewish working population and supported more than one-seventh of the total Jewish population. It is in effect a Jewish industry: practically all the tailors and shoemakers in the Pale are Jews. They predominate as well in the preparation of food products, in the building trades, in the metal, wood and tobacco industries.[15] Hampered by legal restrictions, lack of technical education, and lack of capital, they nevertheless have become an essential part of the economic life of the Pale, supplying the needs for industrial products not only of the Jews but of the entire Pale, and, especially of the peasants. In the development of large-scale industry, the Jews have taken a smaller part than the Germans or foreigners, owing to the conditions above referred to. Yet, in 1898, in the fifteen provinces of the Pale, more than one-third of the factories were in Jewish hands.[16] Jewish factory workers were estimated at one-fifth of all the factory workers in the Pale.[17] Trade and commerce engage Jews chiefly, supporting nearly two-thirds of the total Jewish population.[18] As Russia is essentially an agricultural country, trade in agricultural products, such as grain, cattle, furs and hides, _etc._, is of prime importance. Nearly half of the Jewish merchants in the Pale were dealers in these products. Of the dealers in the principal grain products, Jews formed an overwhelming majority. Relatively twenty-six times as many Jews as Russians, in the Pale, were grain dealers.[19] Four-fifths of all the dealers in furs and hides, three-fourths of all the dealers in cattle were Jews.[20] The Jewish traders are agents in the movement of the crops, in the various stages from the direct purchase of the grain from the peasant to its export for the world markets. In view of the lack of development in Russia of modern methods for marketing the agricultural produce, and in view of the fact that the Russian peasant is ignorant of the most elementary principles of trade, the Jewish merchants, with their knowledge of the market and their skillful use of credit, play a vital part in the organization of the Russian grain trade, and control this trade in the Pale and on the Black Sea. In other branches of commerce, the Jews are almost as strongly represented. As sellers to the village and city populations, they carry on the largest part of the retail trade of the Pale. The great majority of the merchants, however, are petty traders or store-keepers. The wholesale merchants enrolled in the guilds, on the other hand, constitute a large proportion of all the guild merchants. Thus, through their activity as petty artisans, traders and merchants, the Jews preponderate in the industrial and commercial life of the Pale. As manufacturers and wholesale merchants they play a less important but nevertheless significant part in all Russia.