s also, which have passed
through similar experiences, the proportion of skilled to unskilled
labor is very much smaller than it was before the war. There have also
been two mobilizations of railway workers, and these, I think, may be
partly responsible for the undoubted improvement noticeable during
the year, although this is partly at least due to other things beside
conscription. In the first place Trotsky carried with him into the
Commissariat of Transport the same ferocious energy that he has shown in
the Commissariat of War, together with the prestige that he had gained
there. Further, he was well able in the councils of the Republic to
defend the needs of his particular Commissariat against those of all
others. He was, for example able to persuade the Communist Party to
treat the transport crisis precisely as they had treated each crisis
on the front-that is to say, to mobilize great numbers of professed
Communists to meet it, giving them in this case the especial task of
getting engines mended and, somehow or other, of keeping trains on the
move.

But neither the bridges mended and the wood cut by the labor armies,
nor the improvement in transport, are any final proof of the success of
industrial conscription. Industrial conscription in the proper sense
of the words is impossible until a Government knows what it has to
conscript. A beginning was made early this year by the introduction of
labor books, showing what work people were doing and where, and serving
as a kind of industrial passports. But in April this year these had not
yet become general in Moscow although the less unwieldy population of
Petrograd was already supplied with them. It will be long even if it is
possible at all, before any considerable proportion of the people not
living in these two cities are registered in this way. A more useful
step was taken at the end of August, in a general census throughout
Russia. There has been no Russian census since 1897. There was to have
been another about the time the war began. It was postponed for obvious
reasons. If the Communists carry through the census with even moderate
success (they will of course have to meet every kind of evasion), they
will at least get some of the information without which industrial
conscription on a national scale must be little more than a farce.
The census should show them where the skilled workers are. Industrial
conscription should enable them to collect them and put the