Very often the peasants find industrial occupations without leaving
home, for various industries which do not require complicated machinery
are practised in the villages by the peasants and their families. Wooden
vessels, wrought iron, pottery, leather, rush-matting, and numerous
other articles are thus produced in enormous quantities. Occasionally we
find not only a whole village, but even a whole district occupied almost
exclusively with some one kind of manual industry. In the province of
Vladimir, for example, a large group of villages live by Icon-painting;
in one locality near Nizhni-Novgorod nineteen villages are occupied
with the manufacture of axes; round about Pavlovo, in the same province,
eighty villages produce almost nothing but cutlery; and in a locality
called Ouloma, on the borders of Novgorod and Tver, no less than two
hundred villages live by nail-making.

These domestic industries have long existed, and were formerly an
abundant source of revenue--providing a certain compensation for
the poverty of the soil. But at present they are in a very critical
position. They belong to the primitive period of economic development,
and that period in Russia, as I shall explain in a future chapter, is
now rapidly drawing to a close. Formerly the Head of a Household bought
the raw material, had it worked up at home, and sold with a reasonable
profit the manufactured articles at the bazaars, as the local fairs are
called, or perhaps at the great annual yarmarkt* of Nizhni-Novgorod.
This primitive system is now rapidly becoming obsolete. Capital and
wholesale enterprise have come into the field and are revolutionising
the old methods of production and trade. Already whole groups of
industrial villages have fallen under the power of middle-men, who
advance money to the working households and fix the price of the
products. Attempts are frequently made to break their power by voluntary
co-operative associations, organised by the local authorities or
benevolent landed proprietors of the neighbourhood--like the benevolent
people in England who try to preserve the traditional cottage
industries--and some of the associations work very well; but the
ultimate success of such "efforts to stem the current of capitalism"
is extremely doubtful. At the same time, the periodical bazaars and
yarmarki, at which producers and consumers transacted their affairs
without mediation, are being replaced by permanent stores and by various
c