Note 10 — Chapter I · THE DECENTRALISATION OF INDUSTRIES.

Here are the figures obtained by the official census of 1908. In all the cotton industry, only 220,563 men (including boys), 262,245 women, and 90,061 girls less than eighteen years old were employed. They produced 6,417,798,000 yards of unbleached gray, and 611,824,000 yards of bleached white and coloured cottons—that is, 160 yards per head of population—and 1,507,381,000 lb. of yarn, valued £96,000,000. We have thus 12,271 yards of cotton, and 2,631 lb. of yarn per person of workpeople employed. For woollens and worsted there were 112,438 men and boys, 111,492 women, and 34,087 girls under eighteen. The value (incomplete) of the woven goods was about £40,250,000, and that of the yarn about £21,000,000. These figures are most instructive, as they show how much man can produce with the present machinery. Unfortunately, the real productivity in a modern factory is not yet understood by the economists. Thus, we saw lately Russian economists very seriously maintaining that it was necessary to “proletarize” the peasants (about 100,000,000) in order to create a great industry. We see now that if one-fourth, or even one-fifth, part only of the yearly increase of the population took to industry (as it has done in Germany), Russian factories would soon produce such quantities of all sorts of manufactured goods, that they would be able to supply with them 400 or 500 million people, in addition to the population of the Russian Empire.