productive organism, with feelers stretching into the country,
and actual outposts there in the form of agricultural
enterprises taking their directives from the centre and
working as definite parts of the State organism. All round
this town organism, in all its interstices, it too, with its feelers
in the form of "food speculators," is the anarchic chaos of
the country, consisting of a myriad independent units,
regulated by no plan, without a brain centre of any kind.
Either the organized town will hold its own against and
gradually dominate and systematize the country chaos, or
that chaos little by little will engulf the town organism.
Every workman who leaves the town automatically places
himself on the side of the country in that struggle. And
when a town like Moscow loses a third of its working
population in a year, it is impossible not to see that, so far,
the struggle is going in favor of that huge chaotic,
unconscious but immensely powerful countryside. There is
even a danger that the town may become divided against
itself. Just as scarcity of food leads to food speculation, so
the shortage of labor is making possible a sort of
speculation in labor. The urgent need of labor has led to a
resurrection of the methods of the direct recruiting of
workmen in the villages by the agents of particular factories,
who by exceptional terms succeed in getting workmen where
the Government organs fail. And, of course, this recruiting
is not confined to the villages. Those enterprises which are
situated in the corn districts are naturally able to offer better
conditions, for the sake of which workmen are ready to
leave their jobs and skilled workmen to do unskilled work,
and the result can only be a drainage of good workmen away