manufacturers be concerned about the future? Their profits during this period promised to exceed anything that had ever been dreamt of before, or would ever come again. An intelligent and incorrupt Government would have compelled the manufacturers to enlarge their plant. Less speculative and less rapacious manufacturers would themselves have spared their old plant and made every effort to enlarge it. But the Russian Government was only too glad when the crisis, which might have ended in revolution, brought about such unexpected co-operation with the people. And the manufacturers—whether they saw the coming Revolution or not—had only one thought: of how to increase their output and bleed their resources of machinery to the utmost in that golden time of profit-making.
It was, indeed, a period of rapacious exploitation of plant, machinery, and labour. It was a "bacchanalia of profiteering." And the exhaustion of the country under the mobilisation of industry went further in a few months than a sound economical exploitation of the country's resources, even in war time, could have brought about in as many years. Undoubtedly, the mobilisation of industry enormously increased the supplies of the army, but under it the wants of the civil population became more and more intolerable. In a few months the Russian Army had plenty of munitions, but the nation was exhausted, its transport system paralysed, and its industry almost ruined.
Thus, while all the official and unofficial correspondents were sending joyful messages from Russia—saying how she had safely passed through her grave crisis, and how splendidly the Army was now equipped with guns and munitions—Russia was actually passing into another and much graver crisis which was to lead straight to the Revolution.
