had taken new root and were unwilling to return. I believe,
that in spite of the mobilization, the oil-wells are still short of
men. In the coal districts also, which have passed through
similar experiences, the proportion of skilled to unskilled
labor is very much smaller than it was before the war.
There have also been two mobilizations of railway workers,
and these, I think, may be partly responsible for the
undoubted improvement noticeable during the year,
although this is partly at least due to other things beside
conscription. In the first place Trotsky carried with him into
the Commissariat of Transport the same ferocious energy
that he has shown in the Commissariat of War, together
with the prestige that he had gained there. Further, he
was well able in the councils of the Republic to defend the
needs of his particular Commissariat against those of all
others. He was, for example able to persuade the
Communist Party to treat the transport crisis precisely as
they had treated each crisis on the front-that is to say, to
mobilize great numbers of professed Communists to meet it,
giving them in this case the especial task of getting engines
mended and, somehow or other, of keeping trains on the

move.


But neither the bridges mended and the wood cut by the
labor armies, nor the improvement in transport, are any final
proof of the success of industrial conscription. Industrial
conscription in the proper sense of the words is impossible
until a Government knows what it has to conscript. A