he uneducated workers this was an important discovery, and
they soon began to put the suggested remedy to a practical test. In the
autumn of 1894 labour troubles broke out in the Nevski engineering works
and the arsenal, and in the following year in the Thornton factory and
the cigarette works. In all these strikes the Social Democratic agents
took part behind the scenes. Avoiding the main errors of the old
propagandists, who had offered the workmen merely abstract Socialist
theories which no uneducated person could reasonably be expected to
understand, they adopted a more rational method. Though impervious to
abstract theories, the Russian workman is not at all insensible to the
prospect of bettering his material condition and getting his everyday
grievances redressed. Of these grievances the ones he felt most keenly
were the long hours, the low wages, the fines arbitrarily imposed by
the managers, and the brutal severity of the foreman. By helping him
to have these grievances removed the Social Democratic agents might gain
his confidence, and when they had come to be regarded by him as his real
friends they might widen his sympathies and teach him to feel that his
personal interests were identical with the interests of the working
classes as a whole. In this way it would be possible to awaken in the
industrial proletariat generally a sort of esprit de corps, which is the
first condition of political organisation.

On these lines the agents set to work. Having formed themselves into a
secret association called the "Union for the Emancipation of the
Working Classes," they gradually abandoned the narrow limits of
coterie-propaganda, and prepared the way for agitation on a larger
scale. Among the discontented workmen they distributed a large number
of carefully written tracts, in which the material grievances were
formulated, and the whole political system, with its police, gendarmes,
Cossacks, and tax-gathers, was criticised in no friendly spirit,
but without violent language. In introducing into the programme this
political element, great caution had to be exercised, because the
workmen did not yet perceive clearly any close connection between their
grievances and the existing political institutions, and those of
them who belonged to the older generation regarded the Tsar as the
incarnation of disinterested benevolence. Bearing this in mind, the
Union circulated a pamphlet for the enlightenment of the labouring
populati