Russian Granaries. 



A return issued by the Board of Trade contains particulars 

 of the existence, at the end of 1896, of 

 Agricultural f our trade unions of agricultural labourers 



Trade Unions. « n Q reat B r jtain, with a total membership 

 of 2^14 persons. In 1892 there were seven such unions with 

 33,334 members ; two of these, however, accounted for nearly 

 32,000 members between them, viz., the National Agricultural 

 Labourers' Union, dissolved in 1895, and the Eastern 

 Counties Labour Federation, dissolved in 1896. The four 

 existing unions date from 1872, 1890, 1892, and 1895 

 respectively ; the latest is at present the only Scotch 

 union making a return, and comprises 1,541 members. Apart 

 from purely agricultural unions, there are fourteen trade 

 unions in connection with " general labour," whose members 

 amounted in 1896 to 73,530, a figure not very different from 

 the average of the preceding four years. It may be noted 

 that the whole number of trade unions reported on in the 

 United Kingdom at the end of 1896 was 1,330, with a total 

 membership of 1,487,562 persons. 



\JBoard of Trade, gfk Report by the Chief Labour Corre- 

 spondent on Trade Unions, 1896. C. 8644. Price is: 4^.] 



From information received through the Foreign Office 

 upon the working of elevators in the chief 

 Granaries in centres Q f t h e grain trade in Russia, it 

 appears that there are at present fifty-six 

 elevators working in Russia, one of which belongs to a 

 zemstvo (local council), another (at St. Petersburg) is a private 

 concern, while the remaining fifty-four all belong to railway 

 companies. The total capacity of these elevators is about 

 250,000 tons, and the quantity of wheat passed through them 

 in 1895 amounted to some 725,000 tons or more. The largest 

 is that of Norossisk, with a capacity of 48,000 tons ; other 

 important elevators are those at Nikolaevsk, Odessa, 

 and St. Petersburg. The earliest elevators date from 1888, 

 having been erected after the promulgation, in the spring of 



