CHAPTER V. 



DEPRESSED CONDITION OF MINING, SMELTING, AND 

 MANUFACTURING ESTABLISHMENTS. 



Foe some three thousand years it has been a proverb — 

 ' It is naught, it is naught, saith the buyer ; but when he 

 is gone his way he boasteth.' Constant complaints are 

 heard that the smelting and manufacturing works in the 

 Ural district have become unremunerative. 



On this point one of my correspondents, on whose state- 

 ments I rely with implicit confidence, wrote to me : — 



' After having travelled over a good part of the Ural, 

 and been at nearly all the principal iron and copper mines 

 and works, including those belonging to Steinbok, Demi- 

 doff, Stroganoff, Sukazanct, Belizovskoi, Druzheinine, 

 Gubina, and many others, besides the Government 

 works at Nijni Isetsky, Miask, Zolotaust, Kushvinsky, 

 Kuyash, Satkinsky, Berozoffsky, and others, I found all in 

 one and the same tale ; nearly all of them are unremunera- 

 tive, and, with few exceptions, all of them in debt and 

 irredeemably mortgaged to the Government, and the Im- 

 perial mines and zavods nearly all stopped or closing. You 

 can buy any of them for an old song — by paying for 32 

 years 6 per cent, on the original outlay of capital, then the 

 property becomes yours out and out for ever, and the only 

 drawback, the only hindrance, is no fuel — the one great 

 desideratum is want of timber ; no more forests to cut 

 down, except at very great distances from the works. 



' I have heard a great deal about the virgin forests in 

 Russia, but though I have been in many Governments, 

 chiefly in the forest zone, and from zavod to zavod on 

 the Ural, both on the Asiatic and on the European side of 

 the mountains, yet I never saw them or ever had the 



