of "food speculators," is the anarchic chaos of the
country, consisting of a myriad independent units, regulated by no plan,
without a brain centre of any kind. Either the organized town will
hold its own against and gradually dominate and systematize the country
chaos, or that chaos little by little will engulf the town organism.
Every workman who leaves the town automatically places himself on the
side of the country in that struggle. And when a town like Moscow loses
a third of its working population in a year, it is impossible not to
see that, so far, the struggle is going in favor of that huge chaotic,
unconscious but immensely powerful countryside. There is even a danger
that the town may become divided against itself. Just as scarcity of
food leads to food speculation, so the shortage of labor is making
possible a sort of speculation in labor. The urgent need of labor has
led to a resurrection of the methods of the direct recruiting of
workmen in the villages by the agents of particular factories, who by
exceptional terms succeed in getting workmen where the Government organs
fail. And, of course, this recruiting is not confined to the villages.
Those enterprises which are situated in the corn districts are naturally
able to offer better conditions, for the sake of which workmen are ready
to leave their jobs and skilled workmen to do unskilled work, and the
result can only be a drainage of good workmen away from the hungry
central industrial districts where they are most of all needed.

Summing up the facts collected in this chapter and in the first on
the lack of things and the lack of men, I think the economic crisis in
Russia may be fairly stated as follows: Owing to the appalling condition
of Russian transport, and owing to the fact that since 1914 Russia has
been practically in a state of blockade, the towns have lost their power
of supplying, either as middlemen or as producers, the simplest needs
of the villages. Partly owing to this, partly again because of the
condition of transport, the towns are not receiving the necessaries of
life in sufficient quantities. The result of this is a serious fall in
the productivity of labor, and a steady flow of skilled and unskilled
workmen from the towns towards the villages, and from employments the
exercise of which tends to assist the towns in recovering their old
position as essential sources of supply to employments that tend to
have the opposite effect. If this