Although, as before stated, there was neither army nor navy to maintain, there was, nevertheless, a sort of conscription in force that exacted for public purposes the service of all young men between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five. By these conscripts, called zerdars, were performed those labors which, however useful or indispensable, are not attractive as life employments to those not compelled to follow them.
At seventeen each young man was expected to report for duty at a certain place. There, unless allowed to return home for another year, he was at once assigned to some duty, always at a distance from home. According as exigency required, any zerdar might become a sailor, a miner, a member of the sanitary police, and so on. The nature of the training they had received rendered them fully competent for the management of the machinery that had superseded muscular labor in every department of life.
The younger were first assigned to comparatively light tasks. I had already remarked, with some surprise, that the conductors of the city railroads, and other similar
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