486 



THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



government of his intention and received 

 its permission. 



No forests essential to the water sup- 

 ply may be cut, and cattle are not allowed 

 to graze on reforested areas until the 

 young trees are 15 years old, or have 

 reached a height of 10 feet. All forest 

 areas considered protective against ero- 

 sion by water or the shifting of sands are 

 exempt from taxation. 



RUSSIAN industrie;s 



Russia ranks third among the countries 

 of Europe in the number of cotton spin- 

 dles in operation. Out of the 131 million 

 cotton spindles in the world, 54 million 

 are in Great Britain, 28 million in the 

 United States, 10 million in Germany, 

 and eight million in Russia. Besides 

 137,000 automatic and 2,000 hand looms 

 operated by mules, there were about 40,- 

 000 hand looms operated by peasants. 

 The 750 factories employed about 388,- 

 000 hands. The Russian manufacturers 

 last year asserted that if they could buy 

 they could use $100,000,000 worth of our 

 cotton annually, but that most of it was 

 sold several times before reaching the 

 mill owner, thus making the price to him 

 too high, with no advantage therein to 

 the producer himself. Before the war 

 Russia was producing $300,000,000 

 worth of cotton goods annually, using 

 raw cotton to a value of $120,000,000, 

 $48,000,000 being the value of the por- 

 tion coming from the United States. 

 An import duty of nearly six cents a 

 pound is levied on raw cotton entaring 

 Russia. 



Employees in Russian factories must 

 be given all the holidays of their re- 

 spective church, whether orthodox or 

 otherwise. A factory employing a thou- 

 sand hands must maintain at least a 

 ten-bed hospital. Damages for the death 

 of a workman, as a result of an accident 

 occurring while in the discharge of his 

 duties, must be paid to the needy mem- 

 bers of his family. 



Wages in Russia are very low. A com- 

 mon laborer in Petrograd receives about 

 forty cents a day, and a carpenter seventy 

 cents. At Moscow the monthly wages of 

 men in factories are from five to eight 



dollars, and of women from three to six 

 dollars. 



The hours of labor are long — from ten 

 to eleven and a half hours — and yet so 

 anxious are the peasants who work in 

 the factories to learn to read and write 

 that they often go, after the long, hard 

 day's work in the factory, to night schools. 



THE je;ws 



More than half of the 13 million Jews 

 in the world live in Russia, where they 

 are officially called "Those who follow 

 the Mosaic Creed." While the rest of 

 the world — Germany, Austria, France, 

 and Spain — were persecuting these peo- 

 ple Poland was offering them asylum, 

 and they accepted that haven as a God- 

 given refuge. When Poland was parti- 

 tioned the bulk of its Jewish population 

 went with Russia's share, and that is how 

 Russia came to get its Jewish problem. 



The Jews in Russia have had a very 

 hard time of it for generations. An alien 

 race prospering where the native race 

 goes hungry naturally arouses bitterness, 

 and that is what has caused the Rus- 

 sian government to adopt such stren- 

 uous restrictive measures against the 

 Jews. Instances of this repression is 

 written into every chapter of Russian 

 law. There is a double tax on Kosher 

 meat, first on the animal and then on the 

 meat itself ; there is a tax on religious 

 candles used by the Jews; the head of 

 the family must pay a tax for the 

 privilege of wearing a skull-cap during 

 prayers ; not more than 10 per cent of 

 the students of a university may be Jews. 

 The laws forbid the Jews to settle out- 

 side of the urban districts of the 114 

 towns embraced in what is known as the 

 "Pale of Jewish Settlement." Many do 

 settle outside and live in peace until a 

 storm arises on the political horizon, 

 when they absent themselves until it 

 blows over. No office is open to a Jew 

 unless he renounces his religion, which 

 only a fraction of i per cent of them 

 ever do. 



Russia feels that domestic policy re- 

 quires these restrictions of the Jews. 

 Without them, and unfettered, the wide- 

 awake Jew would be too much for the 



