le Germany has freed herself from subjection to France and England,
has manufactured her own cotton-cloth, and constructed her own
machines--in fact, manufactured all commodities--the main industries
have also taken root in Russia, where the development of manufacture is
the more instructive as it sprang up but yesterday.

At the time of the abolition of serfdom in 1861, Russia had hardly any
factories. Everything needed in the way of machines, rails,
railway-engines, fine dress materials, came from the West. Twenty years
later she possessed already 85,000 factories, and the value of the goods
manufactured in Russia had increased fourfold.

The old machinery was superseded, and now nearly all the steel in use in
Russia, three-quarters of the iron, two-thirds of the coal, all
railway-engines, railway-carriages, rails, nearly all steamers, are made
in Russia.

Russia, destined--so wrote economists--to remain an agricultural
territory, has rapidly developed into a manufacturing country. She
orders hardly anything from England, and very little from Germany.

Economists hold the customs responsible for these facts, and yet cottons
manufactured in Russia are sold at the same price as in London. Capital
taking no cognizance of father-lands, German and English capitalists,
accompanied by engineers and foremen of their own nationalities, have
introduced in Russia and in Poland manufactories whose goods compete in
excellence with the best from England. If customs were abolished
to-morrow, manufacture would only gain by it. Not long ago the British
manufacturers delivered another hard blow to the import of cloth and
woolens from the West. They set up in southern and middle Russia immense
wool factories, stocked with the most perfect machinery from Bradford,
and already now Russia imports only the highest sorts of cloth and
woolen fabrics from England, France and Austria. The remainder is
fabricated at home, both in factories and as domestic industries.

The main industries not only move eastward, they are spreading also to
the southern peninsulas. The Turin Exhibition of 1884 already
demonstrated the progress made in Italian manufactured produce; and, let
us not make any mistake about it, the mutual hatred of the French and
Italian middle classes has no other origin than their industrial
rivalry. Spain is also becoming an industrial country; while in the
East, Bohemia has suddenly sprung into importance as a new centre of
man