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And this will go on in July also, when the peasants, without obtaining sufficient sleep, reap the oats by night, lest it should fall, and the women rise gloomily to thresh out the straw for the bands to tie the sheaves; when this old woman, already utterly cramped by the labor of mowing, and the woman with child, and the young children, injure themselves overworking and over-drinking; and when neither hands, nor horses, nor carts will suffice to bring to the ricks that grain with which all men are nourished, and millions of poods of which are daily required in Russia to keep people from perishing.
Near our landing was a mill, where a man, a boy, and a horse were manufacturing meal at the rate of seven poods or 280 pounds a day. The whole machinery was on the most primitive scale. Entering the house of the mill-owner I found the principal apartment quite neat and well arranged, its walls being whitewashed and decorated with cheap lithographs and wood-cuts.
Twenty or thirty feet of earth to take away is by no means uncommon. The pay-dirt is very rich, and the estimates of its yield are stated at so many zolotniks of gold for a hundred poods of earth. From one pood of dirt, of course unusually rich, Mr. Kaporaki obtained 24 zolotniks, or three ounces of gold. In another instance ten poods of dirt yielded 90 zolotniks of gold.
This was formerly thrown away, but by a newly invented process the copper is extracted and saved. The production of silver in the Altai mines is about a thousand and fifty poods annually, or forty thousand pounds avoirdupois. The silver is cast into bars or cakes about ten inches square, and weighing from seventy to a hundred pounds each.
In 1865 Posyet was visited by ten merchant vessels; it exported fifteen thousand poods of beche de mer, the little fish formerly the monopoly of the Feejees, and of which John Chinaman is very fond. It exported ten thousand poods of bean cake, and eleven times that quantity of a peculiar sea-grass eaten by the Celestials. Ginseng root was also an article of commerce between Posyet and Shanghae.
The principal articles cultivated were wheat, rye, hemp, and garden vegetables, and he thought the grain product of 1866 in his district would be thirty thousand poods of wheat and the same of rye. With a population of fifteen hundred in a new country, this result was very good. The Goldees do not engage in agriculture as a business.
Well, I had a hundred poods for sale; the women mowed it on the water-meadow. Well, we struck a bargain all right, willingly...." He complained of the elder, and kept turning round to the peasants as though inviting them to bear witness; his face flushed red and perspired, and his eyes grew sharp and angry. "I don't know why you are saying all this," said the police inspector.
Townsfolk and factory workers lack food, fuel, raw materials and much else that in a civilized State is considered a necessary of life. Thus, ten million poods of fish were caught last year, but there were no means of bringing them from the fisheries to the great industrial centres where they were most needed. Townsfolk are starving, and in winter, cold.
In the shale mines on the Volga, where food conditions are comparatively good, productivity is comparatively high. Thus in a small mine near Simbirsk there are 230 workmen, of' whom 50 to 60 are skilled. The output for the unskilled is 28.9 poods in a shift, for the skilled 68.3.
The figures are in poods. Made on Average week Factory the Sunday Day Output But this uneven working temperament was characteristic of the Russian before the war as well as now. It has been said that the revolution removed the stimulus to labor, and left the Russian laziness to have its way. In the first period of the revolution that may have been true. It is becoming day by day less true.
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