(“THE TRADE OF THE WORLD” PAPERS)
BY JAMES DAVENPORT WHELPLEY
Author of “The Commercial Strength of Great Britain,” “Germany’s Foreign Trade,” etc.
IF they knewe their strength, no man were able to make match with them: nor they that dwel neere them should have any rest of them. But I thinke it is not God’s will: For I may compare them to a young horse that knoweth not his strength, whome a little childe ruleth and guideth with a bridle, for all his great strength; for if hee did, neither childe nor man could rule him.—From “The Voyage of Richard Chancellor, Pilote Major, the First Discoverer by Sea of the Kingdome of Moscovia, Anno 1553.” (Hakluyt’s “Voyages.”)
THE day of the awakening has come, and nearly four hundred years after these Northern voyagers discovered “the Kingdome of Moscovia” the world is witness to the greatest economic evolution in history. A nation of 165,000,000 people, increasing in numbers at the rate of nearly 3,000,000 a year despite famines, wars, and the rigors of terrible winters, occupying an area of 8,650,000 square miles, or two and a half times that of the United States, and with a proportionate wealth of natural resources, is finding itself.
The results are not problematical. The same laws of progress and development now govern Russia as have governed other countries in the past, and brought them to their present position of wealth and continuing prosperity. In all times some one nation has led the rest as the most powerful of all. It is equally true that no one nation has held this position for more than the allotted time. In the past the ascendancy of one people over another has been largely due to a greater spirit of aggressiveness or warlike tendency. In the future one nation will lead another through greater economic wealth and sturdiness of national character. In a broad sense the world is becoming commercialized, though in its best meaning this does not imply that the trader is the leader and the exponent of the nation’s life; he is merely the means to an end. Through him the world becomes more of a kin; he opens the road to civilization with all its equalizing and protective features, and, having served as the pioneer, is then regulated through the influences which follow in the wake of his adventures. Despoiling the weak is no longer the unrebuked spirit of strong nations, and international neutralization is gradually spreading its protecting influence over a large part of the earth’s surface. It is from the point of national wealth and national character, therefore, that the near future of every country must now be judged. The prophet of to-day talks not of wars and plagues; he foresees the true value of what lies in the ground and the strength or weakness of a people in realizing wisely or wastefully upon their entail.
The most powerful country of the future will be Russia, and her elements of greatness are writ fair across her thousands of miles of territory and in the character of her sturdy, peaceful, industrious, and phlegmatic people. The wealth of Russia lies in the ground, and centuries of industry will not exhaust the possibilities of expansion. From her 900,000,000 acres of forest, as compared with the 88,000,000 in the United States, will come the world’s supply of timber. There are now 250,000,000 acres of land under the plow, whereas there is nearly double that amount in the United States; but Russia can expand her cultivated area twenty-fold and still leave virgin land for coming generations. From this vast farm will come the grain demanded by bread-hungry people in other lands. Oils, minerals, and fuel abound. The advance in development and transportation achieved each year will be the only measure of increasing national and individual wealth. Within the empire itself tremendous and complicated problems face the people.
Political, social, and economic conditions are as in no other land. It is only since 1861 that 22,000,000 peasants ceased to be slaves under the law, and it was some years after that before the law came into practical effect throughout any wide area. It was not until 1864, with the establishment of the zemstvos, or district assemblies, that any measure of local government fell to the lot of the people. It was not until 1890 and the years following that appreciable effort was made in the direction of general education. To-day twenty-seven per cent. of the people above nine years of age can read and write, this being an average for the whole empire, which includes the seventy per cent. of illiterates in Poland and the ninety-five per cent. of illiterates in central Asia. In 1912 the imperial budget provided for an expenditure of $55,000,000 for educational purposes, and the local governments contribute nearly as much more. This is an increase of fifteen per cent. over 1911, and is over three per cent. of the total revenue of the Government. There are now 90,000 primary schools, employing 155,000 teachers, attended by over 4,000,000 pupils.
The change that this one feature of national life will bring about among the people of Russia in the next few years can be appreciated only when the conditions of twenty years ago are fully understood—conditions which gave rise to the stigma of “Darkest Russia.” The light is being let in, and with it are coming perforce changes in administrative methods and in political life which are replete with promise of a new and better era. It requires no effort of the imagination to picture the state of a great nation buried in ignorance and at the mercy of an educated and more or less unscrupulous bureaucracy, but it needs a heroic readjustment of preconceived ideas, a sweeping away of prejudices, and a wide comprehension, to grasp the potentialities of a land and a people like these when latent natural wealth is made accessible and education and comparative freedom of thought and action are given to all. The process must be gradual; limitations upon material development are always severe, and the pace a disappointment to the enthusiastic. Mental and political development is even slower, for it is the new generation and not the old which goes to school, learns to think, and then acts upon the thought. Too rapid growth is dangerous, and unproductive of permanently good results. Some of the greatest and wisest men of Russia, men who have the interests of the country and its people unselfishly at heart, are among those who have been denounced in other countries as well as in their own as “reactionaries.” The closer this really unknown land is studied, the more tremendous and overwhelming in their complexities appear the problems with which its rulers and the people are faced. They can be solved only through the coöperation of all classes.
So far this is a long way from being achieved, but progress has been made, and when all conditions and circumstances are taken into consideration, this progress can be regarded as comparatively rapid; for the work of modernizing Russia dates back no further than the birth of the German Empire or that of modern Italy; in point of fact, less than thirty years. In the last ten years the foreign trade of Russia has doubled, exports and imports keeping pace one with the other in their increasing volume and value. Ten years ago this trade amounted to about $700,000,000; in 1912 it is about $1,400,000,000, of which fifty-six per cent. is exports and forty-four per cent. imports. This total foreign commerce, large as it appears, is considerably less than half that of the United States, though it is worth noting that in no ten-year period in its history did the foreign commerce of the United States ever increase by one hundred per cent., as did that of Russia in the last ten years, and there is every reason to believe that the present rate of increase will continue, barring such hindrances as great droughts or serious political or military disturbances.