in Russia, which remains still agricultural, wheat costs one-half or two-thirds of its London prices, and meat is sold throughout the provinces at about ten farthings (kopecks) the pound. And we may therefore hold that it is not yet proved at all that it is cheaper to live on imported food than to grow it ourselves.
But if we analyse price, and make a distinction between its different elements, the disadvantage becomes still more apparent. If we compare, for instance, the costs of growing wheat in this country and in Russia, we are told that in the United Kingdom the hundredweight of wheat cannot be grown at less than 8s. 7d.; while in Russia the costs of production of the same hundredweight are estimated at from 3s. 6d. to 4s. 9d.65 The difference is enormous, and it would still remain very great even if we admit that there is some exaggeration in the former figure. But why this difference? Are the Russian labourers paid so much less for their work? Their money wages surely are much lower, but the difference is equalised as soon as we reckon their wages in produce. The twelve shillings a week of the British agricultural labourer represents the same amount of wheat in Britain as the six shillings a week of the Russian labourer represents in Russia. As to the supposed prodigious fertility of the soil in the Russian prairies, it is a fallacy. Crops of from sixteen to twenty-three bushels per acre are considered good crops in Russia, while the average hardly reaches thirteen bushels, even in the corn-exporting parts of the empire. Besides, the amount of labour which is necessary to grow wheat in Russia with no thrashing-machines, with a plough dragged by a horse hardly worth the name, with no roads for transport, and so on, is certainly much greater than the amount of labour which is necessary to grow the same amount of wheat in Western Europe.
When brought to the London market, Russian wheat was sold in 1887 at 31s. the quarter, while it appeared from the same Mark Lane Expressfigures that the quarter of wheat could