The trunk queues were the strangest of all. Marya described them as “respectable people whom fear has obliged to forget their respectableness.” She said it was universal, direct, equal, and open fear. They had completely lost their wits. They were afraid of Germans, of Socialists, of peasants, of soldiers. They feared to lose their peace, their comforts, and their lives. They feared to stay in Petrograd, and they feared equally to leave. Marya was even more critical of the people who stood in queues waiting for the street-cars. She said that all civilization, good manners, and delicacy comes off when a Petrograd inhabitant wants to get into a car. The street-car queues were made up chiefly of teachers, clerks, business men, students, and small officials. They were cold, fearful of being late, and preoccupied. They buried themselves in their newspapers and seldom spoke. Heaven help Vera and Ivan if their shoes followed in the footsteps of most shoes and wore out. To get a new pair, Ivan had to stay away from the factory for a whole day. In the evening, when the factory closed, he took his place in a long line on the Morskaya, and settled down to twenty-four hours of waiting. He borrowed a few wooden paving-blocks from the pile that was always waiting to patch up the holes in the street, and made himself as comfortable as the weather permitted. For the length of a block in either direction were hundreds just like him. All night he would sit there, chattering with his neighbor or dozing off to sleep. Sometime the next day he would be rewarded with--no, indeed; not a pair of shiny new boots, but simply a numbered ticket that entitled him a month later to take his place in line again and get his boots. It was estimated that Russia’s grain crops were only fifty to sixty per cent. of normal. At the time of the downfall of the Tsar forty per cent. of her locomotives and rolling stock was out of commission. For three years fifteen million of her men had been out of production. Russia’s front had been mobilized without regard to her rear. The burden of feeding the fifteen million had fallen upon women, old men, children, and the young men who were not fit for military service. To overcome even partially this great loss of man-power, it would have been necessary to apply every possible kind of modern labor-saving device and obtain from the remaining workers the maximum of efficiency. Russia did neither of these two things. Labor-saving machinery was not used to any great extent in the old days, because there was so little value put upon labor. Man-power was the cheapest thing to be had in Russia. The Russian worker had no stake in his job, and was as careless of time as the ruling class was careless of man-power. [Illustration: © Orrin S. Wightman A peasant milkman and his customers. Milk was sold only on card to mothers with babies and for invalids]