14 FIELDS, FACTORIES AND WORKSHOPS. 



In machinery works no comparison can even be made 

 between nowadays and 1861, or even 1870; the whole 

 of that industry having grown up within the last fifteen 

 years. In an elaborate report Prof. Kirpitcheff points 

 out that the progress realised can be best judged by the 

 perfection attained in Russia in building the best steam 

 engines and in the manufacture of water-pipes, which 

 fully compete with Glasgow work. Thanks to English 

 and French engineers to begin with, and afterwards to 

 technical progress within the country itself, Russia needs 

 no longer to import any part of her railway plant And 

 as to agricultural machinery, we know, from several 

 British Consular reports, that Russian reapers and 

 ploughs successfully compete with the same implements 

 of both American and English make. During the last 

 eight or ten years this branch of manufactures has 

 largely developed in the Southern Urals (as a village 

 industry, brought into existence by the Krasnoufimsk 

 Technical School of the local District Council, or 

 zemstvd), and especially on the plains sloping towards 

 the Sea of Azov. About this last region Vice-Consul 

 Green reported, in 1894, as follows.- "Besides some 

 eight or ten factories of importance," he wrote, " the 

 whole of the consular district is now studded with small 

 engineering works, engaged chiefly in the manufacture 

 of agricultural machines and implements, most of them 

 having their own foundries. . . . The town of Ber- 

 dyansk," he added, " can now boast of the largest reaper 

 manufactory in Europe, capable of turning out three 

 thousand machines annually." * 



* Report of Vice-Consul Green, The Economist, gth June, 1894 : 

 " Reapers of a special type, sold at 15 to 17, are durable and go 

 through more work than either the English or the American reapers". 

 In the year 1893, 20,000 reaping machines, 50,000 ploughs, and so on, 

 were sold in that district only, representing a value of 822,000. Were 

 it not for the simply prohibitive duties imposed upon foreign pig-iron 

 (two and a half times its price in the London market), this industry would 

 have taken a still greater development. But in order tQ protect the home 

 iron industry which consequently continues to cling to obsolete fcrrui 



