Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/95

 power for production and transportation, and adapted it to their similar needs ."

I will summarize. Russia is a country of immense agricultural forces and possibilities. And this place occupied by agriculture in the economic life of Russia at the same time secures her industrial development. The agricultural Russia is that steadily growing market on the basis of which Russian industry will develop. The Russian peasant democracy is still in swaddling clothes, and its development in the atmosphere of economic independence and political freedom will mean the growth of industrial culture throughout the Empire. In spite of the many defects inherent in us Russians, there are in Russia no signs at all either of degeneracy or senility.

All our energies must be directed to one end: to the elevation of the masses of the people through the improvement of the "personal fitness" of the individuals composing these masses. This is the task, in the execution of which the paths of economics, ethics, and religion, meet and cross. For man is the chief agent in the economic life. Economic fitness can only rest on moral qualities, and moral qualities as living energy issue in the long run from the religious consciousness. Your great thinker once said that it is open to serious question whether among national manufactures that of souls of a good quality may not at last turn out a quite leadingly lucrative one.