World-commerce has, until very recently, left the Ukraine almost untouched. This is one of the reasons why the primitive forms of commerce were able to last so long in the Ukraine. Until recently, world-commerce has taken the Ukraine merely for a producing and exporting country of raw materials, and left the supplying of local demands to the traditional forms of trade. Only within the last decades has the modern commercial organization begun slowly to take in the Ukraine. The exchanges in Kiev, Kharkiv, Odessa, Kreminchuk, Mikolaiv, Tahanroh, Rostiv, the chambers of commerce in Lviv and Brodi, are organizing the export of raw materials from the Ukraine, and the flooding of the country with the products of foreign industry is becoming more and more intensive. In spite of all we have mentioned, the significance of the Ukraine in the internal commerce of Russia and in world-trade is very great. The natural resources of the country, its situation on the threshold of Asia and the Mediterranean world, its property of being a direct hinterland of the Black Sea, give to the Ukraine a commercial importance with which that of any other individual district of European Russia, the Baltic lands and Poland not excepted, can never compare. In the internal commerce of Russia, the Ukraine figures, first of all, as purveyor of foodstuffs, and in Austria-Hungary the Austrian Ukraine plays the same part on a small [296]scale. To represent these relations in figures encounters great difficulties, and the figures can be only approximate. In 1895 the Ukraine exported over 1.5 million metric hundredweights of grain to Lithuania and White Russia, about 1.7 million metric hundredweights to Poland, and about 0.9 million metric hundredweights to Central Russia. In 1905, two Ukrainian districts alone, Poltava and Kharkiv, exported over 0.7 metric hundredweights of grain to Central Russia. These figures must be much greater today. And the grain exportation of the Austrian Ukraine to the interior of Austria must be relatively as great. As a matter of fact, Galicia produces one-third of the total Austrian output of oats and wheat, and almost half the output of potatoes.