mill. After being refused permission to inspect the big munition

works to which I applied--refused by the workers’ committee, not by the proprietors--I wandered through the Viborg district of Petrograd until I found another large factory. This time the permit given me by the Minister of Labor worked better, and I was shown into the general office of the plant. It was a big, modern, up-to-date office, furnished with the usual desks, files, safes and the like, but to remind me that I was in revolutionary Russia, the walls were decorated with many red flags, and banners inscribed with white-lettered mottoes and declarations. The head of the workmen’s committee, who came forward to meet me, looked a little doubtful about letting me go through the mill, but just then the door opened and a strapping young Englishman came in. “See the works?” said he. “Of course you may. I’d like nothing better than to show my mills just now to newspaper people. I call them my mills yet, but only for a joke.”

He said something in Russian to the workman, who shrugged his shoulders and stood aside, and Mr. Cheshire and I went into the nearest mill room. It was a storeroom, as a matter of fact, the receiving room for the huge bales of coarse yarn spun in another mill. The bales were soft and made excellent beds, a fact that was not overlooked, for two tired Russian mill-workers reposed blissfully on a pile of bales as we passed through, sleeping the sleep of the just. They were not the only sleepers I saw in that mill. Several women were taking naps on piles of cloth near their machines, and a great many of the workers, men and women, might as well have been asleep, for they were doing no work. One woman was displaying a new pair of shoes to a group of other women, who stopped their machines to look. Shoes are so expensive in Russia at present that a new pair is worth looking at, I admit, but they might have postponed the exhibition until closing time. These women stood and discussed the shoes, from every point of view, apparently, nor did they go back to their machines when we stopped and discussed the women.

“Do you mean to tell me that you cannot order them back to their work?” I asked.

“Oh, I can order them,” was the reply. “But if they choose not to go that would make me look rather foolish, wouldn’t it?”

“You could discharge them, couldn’t you?” I countered.

“I certainly could not,” declared Mr. Cheshire. “Nobody can discharge an employé until the shop committee has sat on the case and decided that it does not want the man or woman in the mill. All I can do is to make my complaints to the committee and ask it to act.”

Mr. Cheshire was born in Russia, and has lived there all his life except for a few years spent in an English school. Yet he speaks the English of his grandfather, the same unmistakable little Lancashire burr. He has the Lancastrian’s sense of humor also and he laughed even when he told me of the demoralization and ruin in which the fantasies of the revolution had plunged his business. The utter absurdity of it was as present in his mind as the disaster.

“Look at that man,” he said, pointing to a machine at which a man sat and wound cotton cloth into huge round cylinders. “He and the others at his particular job have had their wages raised to sixteen rubles (about $5.25) a day. Yes, of course. The committee decides on the wage scale. I am not consulted. Even if I were, I should have nothing except a complimentary vote, one against hundreds. That chap gets sixteen rubles a day, and in addition I must hire a girl at four rubles a day to lift the roll of cloth off the machine.”

We passed into a print room still discussing the committee. I asked Mr. Cheshire if it was true that these workmen’s committees were highly paid men who performed no service to their employers and still received their regular pay.

“It is true,” he replied. Then he went on to tell me the following story: “The work we do in this room is something a little unusual in Russia. Few mills have these machines as yet, and our product is almost the only cotton goods of the kind possible to buy in Russian markets since the war. Before that a great deal of it was imported from England and Germany. Naturally it is scarce at present, and not long ago one of our men complained that he couldn’t buy it at all. ‘Of course you cannot,’ I told him, ‘because these mills are turning out very little of it. Go into the print room and see for yourself how many machines are idle for lack of workers.’ And then I made him this offer, for he was a member of the committee: ‘Let me have four men of your committee back to work on these machines, and I will guarantee that you will soon be able to buy the goods you want.’ Well, he agreed, and he got the rest of the committee to agree, and I got the men back. But what do you think those four men demanded? They said that they had been doing hard mental work on the committee for two months, and they thought before they went back to the machines they ought to have a month’s vacation with pay. I did draw the line there. I told them I’d close the works first. But since then I understand that the committee has begun to discuss the two months on and one month off as a future policy. They say that mental work--they call committee meetings mental work--is much harder than physical labor.”

“I’m glad they are finding it out,” I remarked. “Perhaps after a while they will discover that even you belong to the proletariat.”

“If they raise the wages again,” said Mr. Cheshire, “I mean to ask them to give me a job. I’ll have to. Then they’ll have some real mental work finding out how to pay me or themselves either. This factory and all the others in our name have been running farther and farther behind for months. Soon we shall have to close. We should have been closed before now except that we hoped that a strong government would be formed and industry as well as the army and navy would be placed under a dictatorship.”

The committees have created an eight-hour day in this particular industry. Some industries have a six-hour day, and I was told that numbers of working people claimed that a two-hour day was the ideal towards which they aspired. I heard also, on good authority, that certain groups favored a complete cessation of all factory work during the three hot months of summer.

Mr. Cheshire’s mills were supposed to run eight hours a day, but he declared that he would be satisfied, in present circumstances, to get a good, solid five hours’ work out of his people. If they would stay on the job and actually produce for five hours every working day he thought he might avert bankruptcy. “We close at five,” he told me. “But along about 4 o’clock you watch them begin to go home.”

I watched and they did. Man after man and woman after woman stopped all work and began to put on their shoes. Many millworkers work barefooted. They gathered in little knots at a window and looked out, talking aimlessly. They strolled about the rooms. Some just stopped work and went out. At half past four in the rooms through which I walked, not half the machines were running.

“Is it really like this in all the mills and factories of Russia?” I asked, “or is this mill an exception to the rule? Is it worse than the average?”

“It is no worse than most,” was the reply. “It is better than some. Industrial Russia has completely broken down in some places. It is rapidly breaking down everywhere.”

What I saw afterwards absolutely confirmed this statement. The industrial world is as much in the hands of the Bolsheviki or extremists as are the councils of workmen’s and soldiers’ delegates. While the provisional government of the early weeks of the revolution discussed ways and means whereby the workers in mills and factories might gradually acquire an interest in their industries and a voice in the councils of the managers, the workers settled the whole thing by turning the employers out and taking over the industries themselves. They have voted themselves enormous salaries, short hours and little work. But they have done little or nothing to insure the permanence of the salaries. Soon there will be, instead of an eight hour day, no working day at all. All the shops and factories will close.

In Moscow is the largest and finest department store in Russia. It is an English concern, Muir & Merrilies, managed and largely owned by Mr. William L. Cazalet. I know him well, and his testimony, when I saw him in August, bore out this statement. The committee in Muir & Merrilies voted that they found it inconvenient to have clerks and other employés go home for lunch at different hours. They therefore ordered the store closed every day from 12 to 2 o’clock. The store was accordingly closed.

“I don’t mind,” said Mr. Cazalet cheerfully. “My stocks are running low, the transportation system is on the verge of collapse, and I can’t get any more goods. As each line of goods is exhausted I shall close the department. When the time comes I shall close the store and go home to England for a vacation.”

He will go, as Daniel Cheshire went, others will follow, and the workers will own their tools. They won’t own anything else.