Page:Emile Vandervelde - Three Aspects of the Russian Revolution - tr. Jean Elmslie Henderson Findlay (1918).djvu/68

 Comfortably-off clerks in Petrograd, who before the war lived at the rate of two hundred roubles per month, have been obliged to practise many economies so as to manage to make ends meet with the six hundred and fifty roubles which they are spending to-day. We must remember that in all times of national crisis the cost of living increases much more in proportion as the mode of living is simpler.

In such conditions we can well believe that the workmen profited very naturally by the liberty they had achieved to demand an important rise in their wages. Unfortunately their claims in this respect, as one must expect on the part of a proletariat unaccustomed to economic negotiations, lacked co-ordination and therefore measure. The facility with which their first requests were granted incited them generally to ask more and more, and as employers, either from fear or weakness, or from some deeper motive, made but little objection to these demands, nor even troubled as a rule to discuss them seriously, it happened that certain categories of workmen increased