This is really the country where wishes are horses, for you see beggars riding. What a lot of wishes astray on these mountains!
“Where have you been?” I asked.
“Looking for a job.”
“Where?”
“On the new railway.”
“Couldn’t you get one?”
“No; there were thousands waiting, and they only took on two hundred, and these at the lowest wage piece-work.” He mentioned some figure the cubic foot.
“How much can a man earn in a month if he goes at it hard?” I asked.
“Twenty roubles (two guineas), not more,” said my acquaintance.
Imagine it—for a job of ten shillings a week, bestial labour, in the desert, under the Central Asian sun, something like a twenty to one excess of supply over demand of labour, and the people waiting weeks, months, on the chance. Surely nowhere but in Russia could such a phenomenon be noted. There, as nowhere else in the world, is a tremendous superfluity of white men’s hands. A firm of contractors has this job from the Government; according to their schedule, labour was to be paid for at a certain rate—a very low rate—but, seeing the expectancy and the sad plight of the mobs of unemployed waiting at the starting-point of the new line, they quite cheerfully make a handsome reduction in favour of themselves.