The government also protects the children; no boy may be employed at manual labor, or for a full day, until he has attained his fifteenth year. At the age of thirteen a boy may go into an office for half-days. To encourage schooling a boy who passes the third grade in the common schools is excused from sixteen months’ soldiering. These are comparatively recent regulations, copied, I believe, from Germany. There is no gainsaying their value and reasonableness. That such wise laws as these should be found in connection with an industry where there are such absurd restrictions as, for instance, the preventing of practical miners from becoming superiors, is typically Russian. Not political revolution alone threatens Russia to-day. Industrially, there is every symptom of the disorganization which precedes an industrial revolution. I found Russian workmen agitating armed revolt because they wanted more land! That is the slogan of the peasants. The working-men stand for supporting the peasants in this, in order, as some of them expressed it, that they may quit the industries, and return to the land. So long as workmen look upon their work as a temporary expediency, Russia will not develop a strong working-class. But this is only incident to the transition. Revolution, armed or unarmed, must evolve change, and with the wider liberties and scope for individual development which Russia soon will have, the workmen will have opportunities to develop their own industries. For the present the prime thing is change, immediate and radical change. It matters not what the shibboleth so long as it leads to this. Thus far the workmen have not been allowed to consider themselves as a class--any form of organization is prohibited by the government. Any effort toward “industrial betterment,” improved conditions, or any of the reforms which are common movements in England and America, are unheard of and unknown in Russia. The wonder is that the Russian workman is as good as he is under existing conditions. Given freedom of belief, freedom from ecclesiastic superstition, freedom from civil slavery--freedom of organization, and the Russian workman will develop a vista leading to his own better day. The tenth day of my stay in Yusofka I was called back to Moscow by telegram. The call was urgent so I determined to catch a train from a station some fourteen miles away, which left just at dawn. Hughes himself put me into the same barouche that had brought Mr. Medhurst and me to the home I now left with genuine regret, and drawn by the same black Orloffs. “I’m sending two trusted men with you,” Hughes said, as I gripped his hand in farewell; “both are well armed.” And we rolled out of the gate and into the cool night where furnace fires belched flaring flames above near and far horizons, and where the rattle of mineshaft wheels and cars intruded upon the stillness which properly is the birthright of night, but here is unknown. CHAPTER XXI