THE cost of living in the Caucasus is one-half of what it is in the most thriving agricultural district in Great Britain. This is because Russia is a self-supporting empire; it does not depend on other countries for its food supply. I think the comparative economic positions of England and Russia are inadequately known. In England the land has been sacrificed to manufactures; by adopting Free Trade it made a bargain with other countries in these terms—that it would manufacture iron goods and cloth in exchange for food. It gave up agriculture and it gave up the country. It became a land of towns. The people of the English towns are the English people. Russia, on the other hand, remained an agricultural country, and its manufactures have developed little. It is content to take foreign manufactured goods in exchange for its own superfluous food. The people of Russia are the peasants; the Liberals in the towns don’t really count. For town life and factory life democracy is most suitable, and for country life conservatism and squiredom—for English people democracy, for Russians autocracy. 263Those in England who have a strong wish to have Russia democratised are also, strange to say, Free Traders. Are they aware that if Russia becomes a manufacturing country it will need its food for itself, and will not need to buy our wares? Russia is really the employer of England. What if England loses its job?  
 
“TURNING OVER COTTONS”
 
 
AN OSSETINE VILLAGE
 
The newspaper boom of the revolution has done much harm; it has given English people a false idea of Russia. That notion of Russia as a place of anarchists and gendarmes, secret societies, spies, plots, prisons is ridiculous. As after the Slaves War the Romans lined the way home by poles on which the heads of the conquered were fixed, so to the ordinary outsider appears the boundary line of Russia—a palisade of heads on poles. In truth, it is only fenced in by passport officers, unless the outworks of lies in the European press must be counted. Behind the fence, however, stands, not what so many imagine—cossacks, cannon, prisons—but an extraordinarily fertile, fruitful country, and a people happy enough to be unaware of their happiness or unhappiness. I have spoken to peasants from all parts of the country, and I have not found one who had a word to say against the Tsar, or who felt any grievance against his country’s governors.
 
There are a hundred millions of peasants who swear by God and the Tsar, and who believe implicitly in both God and Tsar, a hundred million strong, healthy peasants, not yet taught to read or write, not yet 264democratised and given a vote, not yet crammed to death in manufacturing towns. These are Europe’s unspent capital, her little store of unspoiled men set against a rainy day, the solid wall between China and the West.
 
It was with these thoughts uppermost in my mind that I came away from one of the July fairs at Vladikavkaz. Such revelations of the bounty of Nature in the abundance of food, and in strong limbs to be nourished by it, I scarcely expect to see easily again. This fair took place at one end of the great military road that traverses the Caucasus, and connects Tiflis and the Persian marches with Rostof and the North. In a great open square, paved unevenly with cobbles, the stalls are set up. At one end are five open forges, where horses are strapped in and shod. Behind these, about a hundred sheep and lambs struggle together, whilst a shepherd milks the ewes into a bucket. At another end of the “bazaar” there is a covered place for cotton goods, and there the Georgian girl buys her kerchief, and the peasant woman turns over all manner of brilliant printed cotton. Between the sheep and the drapery, for a full hundred yards, stand carts and barrows, or, it may be, merely sacks and baskets, full of cucumbers and tomatoes. The cucumbers are piled up on the carts like loads of stones for road-making. The vendors stand beside them and shout their prices. The customers fumble about and pick out the best they can 265find of the stock. Behind or below the stalls the rotten ones lie yellow and soft under the burning sun, and hens come in and peck at them. Several thousand have to be sold before afternoon; more than half will not be disposed of before they are spoiled by the sun. Picture the peasants outbidding one another, fat and perspiring in the heat. Ten for three-halfpence is the highest price, ten for a halfpenny the lowest. By two o’clock in the afternoon one will be able to buy forty for a penny, just to clear. Meanwhile children are dancing about, eating them as one would bananas in England, munching them as if they were large pears, and in a way that would have brought bewilderment to the mind of Sairey Gamp, who so clearly loved a “cowcumber.” A fortnight ago a single cucumber cost twopence—assuredly the tide has risen.
 
Scarcely less in evidence than the luscious green of cucumbers is the reposing yellow and scarlet of the tomatoes—golden apples they call them. These also must be disposed of; they go for a penny a pound, and the baskets of many traffickers are adorned by the purchase of them. Behind the cucumber row is the potato market, where, for sixpence, you may buy two stone of new potatoes. With these are a long array of stalls with vegetables and fruit, everything super-abundant, and at surprising prices. Raspberries and apricots go at twopence a pound, peaches at fourpence, cherries and plums at a penny, gooseberries at a halfpenny, 266blackberries at three-halfpence, and all this fruit in at the same time. Strawberries came suddenly at the beginning of June, and as suddenly disappeared; the summer progresses at quick pace here. New-laid eggs are sold at this fair at a farthing each, cheese at threepence a pound, butter at tenpence, bacon at fourpence and fivepence a pound. Herrings and river fish, sun-dried and cured, are sold ten on a string for two............