the uneducated workers this was an important discovery, and they soon began to put the suggested remedy to a practical test.  In the autumn of 1894 labour troubles broke out in the Nevski engineering works and the arsenal, and in the following year in the Thornton factory and the cigarette works.  In all these strikes the Social Democratic agents took part behind the scenes.  Avoiding the main errors of the old propagandists, who had offered the workmen merely abstract Socialist theories which no uneducated person could reasonably be expected to understand, they adopted a more rational method.  Though impervious to abstract theories, the Russian workman is not at all insensible to the prospect of bettering his material condition and getting his everyday grievances redressed.  Of these grievances the ones he felt most keenly were the long hours, the low wages, the fines arbitrarily imposed by the managers, and the brutal severity of the foreman.  By helping him to have these grievances removed the Social Democratic agents might gain his confidence, and when they had come to be regarded by him as his real friends they might widen his sympathies and teach him to feel that his personal interests were identical with the interests of the working classes as a whole.  In this way it would be possible to awaken in the industrial proletariat generally a sort of esprit de corps, which is the first condition of political organisation.

On these lines the agents set to work.  Having formed themselves into a secret association called the “Union for the Emancipation of the Working Classes,” they gradually abandoned the narrow limits of coterie-propaganda, and prepared the way for agitation on a larger scale.  Among the discontented workmen they distributed a large number of carefully written tracts, in which the material grievances were formulated, and the whole political system, with its police, gendarmes, Cossacks, and tax-gathers, was criticised in no friendly spirit, but without violent language.  In introducing into the programme this political element, great caution had to be exercised, because the workmen did not yet perceive clearly any close connection between their grievances and the existing political institutions, and those of them who belonged to the older generation regarded the Tsar as the incarnation of disinterested benevolence.  Bearing this in mind, the Union circulated a pamphlet for the enlightenment of the labouring population, in which the writer refrained from all reference to the Autocratic Power, and described simply the condition of the labouring classes, the heavy burdens they had to bear, the abuses of which they were the victims, and the inconsiderate way in which they were treated by their employers.  This pamphlet was eagerly read, and from that moment whenever labour troubles arose the men applied to the Social Democratic agents to assist them in formulating their grievances.