themselves drop their tools, lay by their picks and drills, quit the furnace and the forge at spring-and harvest-time, and return to the open to sow and to reap. Russian workers, therefore, are workmen in the making, or at best, men not yet weaned from the soil, workmen of the first generation, with the blood and traditions and even the property of the peasant. The phrase “Russian Workman” is really an anomaly. The Russian workman, properly so-called, is a development of the future. Hewers of wood there are in Russia, and drawers of water, but professional “workmen,” in the technical English sense, referring to the men whose entire lives are spent in the factories and workshops, are few. Industries there are a-plenty: factories, foundries, mines and workshops; but a great part of the men found in them are representative of a transition period, a hybrid production, part peasant, part artisan. Serfdom in Russia was a recognized institution until but yesterday, as it were, and to-day eighty per cent. of the population are people of the land--tillers of soil, guardians of cattle; and the man with the hoe is not technically a workman. Time has about the same value to the Russian workman that it has to the Russian at large--_ceachass_, directly--in an hour or two, when we get round to it! The Russian workman’s day is twelve hours long. But the number of holidays, Church and State, are appalling to a European. At Easter, for example, there are ten days marked in red on Russian calendars. If a factory runs every working-day in the year, that means two hundred and twenty days; but there are few workmen who pretend to work even every working-day. Yet he must so regulate his living as to have enough reserve from his wages to carry him through the holidays. This is simplified for him by the regulations of the Church which prescribes long and stringent fasts. At these times the expenditure for food is reduced to a minimum; likewise the efficiency and productivity of the man. It is no uncommon thing for workmen of massive frame and naturally strong physique to faint from exhaustion in the mills, during the long fasts. Energy, crispness of action, interest in the work, are all impossible under such conditions.