Page:Morgan Philips Price - Siberia (1912).djvu/65

 Rh assume from the analogy of Western Europe that the growth of the industrial proletariat, which seems to be spreading throughout Russia, will not only break down these old social castes, but create new ones under the headings of Capital, Middle Class and Labour. This movement will be intensified if autocratic and bureaucratic power weakens and constitutionalism gradually strengthens. Then will follow a landless, wage-earning proletariat, and the inevitable contest between Capital and Labour, as we have it to-day in Western Europe, the tendency to which is so deeply deplored in Russia by the Slavophil patriots of the old school. As far as Siberia is concerned, my impressions are that this is the direction in which society is moving, and I doubt if the old Slavonic social conditions will survive in Siberia as long as the same conditions have done in European Russia, where sentimental traditions are naturally stronger than in the new country.

On the other hand these new conditions will not grow in a day, for at present in Siberia the wage-earning proletariat are an almost negligible percentage of the population and are only confined to some of the smaller trades in the towns, the railway employés, and the wharf and steamship labour on the rivers. For the rest, taking the population of the Yenisei Government as an example, out of a total population of 787,778 in 1908, the principal social castes existed in the following proportions:—

Peasants, 584,000—five-eighths of the whole population.

Merchants associated to Guilds, 983.

Burghers or urban citizens with small occupations, 52,118.