Lodz — the Manchester of Poland — is quite a German city, and the Russian trade directories are full of English and German names. English and German capitalists, English engineers and foremen, have planted within Russia the improved cotton manufactures of their mother countries; they are busy now in improving the woollen industries and the production of machinery; while Belgians have rapidly created a great iron industry in South Russia. There is now not the slightest doubt — and this opinion is shared, not only by economists, but also by several Russian manufacturers — that a free-trade policy would not check the further growth of industries in Russia. It would only reduce the high profits of those manufacturers who do not improve their factories and chiefly rely upon cheap labour and long hours.
Moreover, as soon as Russia succeeds in obtaining more freedom, a further growth of her industries will immediately follow. Technical education — which, strange to say, was for a long time systematically suppressed by the Government — would rapidly grow and spread; and in a few years, with her natural resource and her laborious youth, which even now tries to combine workmanship with science, Russia would see her industrial powers increase tenfold.