The iron industry has likewise progressed rapidly, though it has not yet outgrown the necessity for Government support, and it is not yet able to provide for all home wants.  About forty years ago it received a powerful impulse from the discovery that in the provinces to the north of the Crimea and the Sea of Azof there were enormous quantities of iron ore and beds of good coal in close proximity to each other.  Thanks to this discovery and to other facts of which I shall have occasion to speak presently, this district, which had previously been agricultural and pastoral, has outstripped the famous Ural region, and has become the Black Country of Russia.  The vast lonely steppe, where formerly one saw merely the peasant-farmer, the shepherd, and the Tchumak,* driving along somnolently with his big, long-horned, white bullocks, is now dotted over with busy industrial settlements of mushroom growth, and great ironworks—­some of them unfinished; while at night the landscape is lit up with the lurid flames of gigantic blast-furnaces.  In this wonderful transformation, as in the history of Russian industrial progress generally, a great part was played by foreigners.  The pioneer who did most in this district was an Englishman, John Hughes, who began life as the son and pupil of a Welsh blacksmith, and whose sons are now directors of the biggest of the South Russian ironworks.

* The Tchumak, a familiar figure in the songs and legends of Little Russia, was the carrier who before the construction of railways transported the grain to the great markets, and brought back merchandise to the interior.  He is gradually disappearing.

Much as the South has progressed industrially in recent years, it still remains far behind those industrial portions of the country which were thickly settled at an earlier date.  From this point of view the most important region is the group of provinces clustering round Moscow; next comes the St. Petersburg region, including Livonia; and thirdly Poland.  As for the various kinds of industry, the most important category is that of textile fabrics, the second that of articles of nutrition, and the third that of ores and metals.  The total production, if we may believe certain statistical authorities, places Russia now among the industrial nations of the world in the fifth place, immediately after the United States, England, Germany, and France, and a little before Austria.

The man who has in recent times carried out most energetically the policy of protecting and fostering native industries is M. Witte, a name now familiar to Western Europe.  An avowed disciple of the great German economist, Friedrich List, about whose works he published a brochure in 1888, he held firmly, from his youth upwards, the doctrine that “each nation should above all things develop harmoniously its natural resources to the highest possible degree of independence, protecting its own industries and preferring the national aim