est
men in Russia to-day have not much money, and those who have things to
exchange are not as a rule workmen. The theory of this man's harmfulness
is, I know, open to argument, but the practice at least is exactly as
I have stated it, and is obviously attractive to the individual who
prefers adventure on a full stomach to useful work on an empty. Setting
aside the theory with its latent quarrel between Free Trade and State
control, we can still recognize that each workman engaged in these
pursuits has become an unproductive middleman, one of that very
parasitic species which the revolutionaries had hoped to make
unnecessary. It is bad from the revolutionary point of view if a workman
is so employed, but it is no less bad from the point of view of people
who do not care twopence about the revolution one way or the other, but
do care about getting Russia on her feet again and out of her economic
crisis. It is bad enough if an unskilled workman is so employed. It is
far worse if a skilled workman finds he can do better for himself as
a "food speculator" than by the exercise of his legitimate craft. From
mines, from every kind of factory come complaints of the decreasing
proportion of skilled to unskilled workmen. The superior intelligence
of the skilled worker offers him definite advantages should he engage in
these pursuits, and his actual skill gives him other advantages in the
villages. He can leave his factory and go to the village, there on
the spot to ply his trade or variations of it, when as a handy man,
repairing tools, etc., he will make an easy living and by lessening
the dependence of the village on the town do as much as the "food
speculator" in worsening the conditions of the workman he has left
behind.

And with that we come to the general changes in the social geography
of Russia which are threatened if the processes now at work continue
unchecked. The relations between town and village are the fundamental
problem of the revolution. Town and countryside are in sharp
contradiction daily intensified by the inability of the towns to supply
the country's needs. The town may be considered as a single productive
organism, with feelers stretching into the country, and actual outposts
there in the form of agricultural enterprises taking their directives
from the centre and working as definite parts of the State organism.
All round this town organism, in all its interstices, it too, with its
feelers in the form