Simultaneously with the inauguration of this enterprise, Russia began to build thousands of miles of railroads, and to encourage the foreign investor, subsidized the Company in the form of advance orders of such magnitude that the New Russia Company, as it was called, in a few years was employing twelve thousand workmen and paying an annual dividend of over twenty per cent. The British workmen, to-day, are all foremen and managers. The workmen are all Russians. Thus the iron- and steel-workers and the coal-miners came into existence in Russia. Other companies, especially under French and Belgian initiative, followed John Hughes and his New Russia Company into the field. The English employers introduced British housing conditions, and British systems so that the Russians early had the advantage of Western methods. Wages were low, and still are, because throughout the country wages are low. Sporadic strikes have occurred; but there are no trade unions as yet. It seems to have been the policy of the foreign companies to pay their workmen, who have come out to Russia from abroad, more than the same men would have received at home, but to pay the Russian workmen the current wages of the country. The name Yusofka is a corruption of Hughesofka, from John Hughes. Mr. Arthur Hughes, my host, the grandson of old John Hughes, was the only member of the family left at the works of the New Russia Company to deal with the men and look after the vast and valuable properties, the holdings of the Company. There is always a deal of romance about engineers who carry civilization into the wilderness, who wrest earth’s treasures from remote plains and unexplored mountains, whether in Mexico or the Andes, South Africa or interior Russia. My experience has been that these men are always workaday fellows who resent it when the picturesque and the heroic side of their lives is mentioned; and Hughes was no exception. A rich man, the son of a now wealthy family, educated at a leading English technical school, and in the Carnegie works in Pittsburg, an expert in the Bessemer process, a cultivated English gentleman in thought, instincts, manner and speech; only thirty; master of twelve thousand restless, wretched workmen, in a foreign country in time of revolution and general lawlessness, and his life constantly threatened; once, when he rescued a young Jewish girl from drunken Cossacks; again, when he recklessly interfered to save a lot of stupid workmen from a Black Hundred entanglement--such is Hughes. He lives absolutely alone, and coolly attends to business day after day, striving to maintain the precedence of his Company over all others in Russia, through the merit and quality of the goods produced. After a day or two I began to understand what Mr. Medhurst meant when he urged me to remain at Yusofka a fortnight. “Hughes will be delighted,” he said, “to have some one to whom he can talk in his own tongue--and, besides, it makes another gun in the house.”