SMALL INDUSTRIES AND INDUSTRIAL VILLAGES. 173 



the country, thus go hand in hand with a high develop- 

 ment of the domestic and petty trades. 



It hardly need be said that in Austria, Hungary, 

 Italy, and even the United States, the petty trades 

 occupy a prominent position, and play in the sum total 

 of industrial activity an even much greater part than 

 in France, Belgium, or Germany. But it is especially 

 in Russia that we can fully appreciate the importance 

 of the rural industries and the terrible sufferings which 

 would be quite uselessly inflicted on the population if 

 the policy of the State were to follow the advice of some 

 arch-reactionary economists of the Moscow Gazette 

 school, and to throw the tremendous weight of the State 

 in favour of a pauperisation of the peasants and an 

 artificial annihilation of the rural trades, in order to 

 create a centralised great industry. 



The most exhaustive inquiries into the present state, 

 the growth, the technical development of the rural in- 

 dustries, and the difficulties they have to contend with, 

 have been made in Russia. A house-to-house inquiry 

 which embraces nearly 1,000,000 peasants' houses has 

 been made in various provinces of Russia, and its re- 

 sults already represent 450 volumes, printed by different 

 county councils (Zemstvos). Besides, in the fifteen 

 volumes published by the Petty Trades Committee, and 

 still more in the publications of the Moscow Statistical 

 Committee, and of many provincial assemblies, we find 

 exhaustive lists giving the name of each worker, the 

 extent and the state of his fields, his live stock, the value 

 of his agricultural and industrial production, his earnings 

 from both sources, and his yearly budget ; while hun- 

 dreds of separate trades have been described in separate 

 monographs from the technical, economical, and sanitary 

 points of view. 



The results obtained from these inquiries are really 

 imposing, as it appears that out of the 80,000,000 

 population of European Russia no less than 7,500,000 



