called Tchekhof, produced a famous “Tsar-cannon,” weighing as much as 96,000 lbs.  The connection thus established with the mechanical arts of the West was always afterwards maintained, and we find frequent notices of the fact in contemporary writers.  In the reign of the grandfather of Peter the Great, for example, two paper-works were established by an Italian; and velvet for the Tsar and his Boyars, gold brocades for ecclesiastical vestments, and rude kinds of glass for ordinary purposes were manufactured under the august patronage of the enlightened ruler.  His son Alexis went a good many steps further, and scandalised his God-fearing orthodox subjects by his love of foreign heretical inventions.  It was in his German suburb of Moscow that young Peter, who was to be crowned “the Great,” made his first acquaintance with the useful arts of the West.

When the great reformer came to the throne he found in his Tsardom, besides many workshops, some ten foundries, all of which were under orders “to cast cannons, bombs, and bullets, and to make arms for the service of the State.”  This seemed to him only a beginning, especially for the mining and iron industry, in which he was particularly interested.  By importing foreign artificers and placing at their disposal big estates, with numerous serfs, in the districts where minerals were plentiful, and by carefully stipulating that these foreigners should teach his subjects well, and conceal from them none of the secrets of the craft, he created in the Ural a great iron industry, which still exists at the present day.  Finding by experience that State mines and State ironworks were a heavy drain on his insufficiently replenished treasury, he transferred some of them to private persons, and this policy was followed occasionally by his successors.  Hence the gigantic fortunes of the Demidofs and other families.  The Shuvalovs, for example, in 1760 possessed, for the purpose of working their mines and ironworks, no less than 33,000 serfs and a corresponding amount of land.  Unfortunately the concessions were generally given not to enterprising business-men, but to influential court-dignitaries, who confined their attention to squandering the revenues, and not a few of the mines and works reverted to the Government.

The army required not only arms and ammunition, but also uniforms and blankets.  Great attention, therefore, was paid to the woollen industry from the reign of Peter downwards.  In the time of Catherine there were already 120 cloth factories, but they were on a very small scale, according to modern conceptions.  Ten factories in Moscow, for example, had amongst them only 104 looms, 130 workers, and a yearly output for 200,000 roubles.