r wars
with China and Russia and their enormous army and navy expenditure),
are ill-prepared to stand further {31} taxation for the benefit of
special interests. On the whole, there seems to have been much truth
in what a recent authority said on this subject:

"The Japanese manufacturers are concerned only to make monopoly
profits out of the consumer. If they can do that, they will not
worry about foreign markets, from which, in fact, their policy is
bound more and more to exclude them."

In any case, manufacturing in Japan is bound to increase, but it ought
not to increase through unjust oppression of agriculture or at the
expense of the physical stamina of the race. This fact is now winning
recognition not only from the nation at large, but from
public-spirited manufacturers as well.

Some very notable evidence upon this point came to me Wednesday when
influential friends secured special permission, not often granted to
strangers, for me to visit the great Kanegafuchi Cotton Spinning
Company's plant near Tokyo--the great surprise being not that I
succeeded in getting permission to visit this famous factory, though
that was partly surprising, but in what I saw on the visit.

Much has been said and written as to the utterly deplorable condition
of Japanese factory workers, and I was quite prepared for sights that
would outrage my feelings of humanity. Imagine my surprise, therefore,
when I found the manager making a hobby of "welfare work" for his
operatives and with a system of such work modelled after the Krupp
system in Germany, the best in the world! And as the Kanegafuchi
Company has seventeen factories in all, representing several cities
and aggregating over 300,000 spindles, being one of the most famous
industries of Japan, it will be seen that its example is by no means
without significance.

The Kanegafuchi's Tokyo factories alone employ 3500 operatives, and
they are cleaner, I should say, than most of our stores and offices.
The same thing is true of their great hospital and boarding-house, and
the dining-room is also {32} surprisingly clean and well kept. Of the
welfare work proper a whole article could be written. Each operative
pays 3 per cent, of his or her wages (most operatives are women) into
a common insurance and pension fund, and the company, out of its
earnings, pays into the fund an equal amount. From this a pension is
given the family of any employee who dies, while if an operative