large stock of patience.
Account must also be taken of the spirit reflected in the speech made
to me by a Japanese friend when I read the foregoing paragraph to
him:

"But we are keen to try. If there were no necessity to prepare for
war, when we must have wool for soldiers, sailors and officials, we
might rely on Australia and elsewhere and hope to improve the inferior
and dirty Chinese wool. But thinking of the disease prevailing in
Northern Manchuria and of service needs, we want to try sheep keeping
with some subsidy in Hokkaido and on the mainland in Northern Aomori
where there is much dry wild land and the farmers are often
miserable--there are villages where the people do not wash. We might
provide some of the wool needed by Japan. We have practically met our
needs in sugar, though of course our needs are small compared with
England and America."

Let us turn from the sheep problem to the factory problem. What are
the difficulties of the woollen industry? In the first place, as we
have seen, there is no home supply of wool worth mentioning. Further,
there is the intricacy of woollen manufacture. Cotton machinery has
been brought to such a pitch of perfection for every operation and
there are in existence so many technical manuals for every department
of cotton manufacture that a certain standardisation of output is not
difficult. The problem of woollen manufacture is much more
complicated. The output cannot be similarly standardised, and there
are many directions in which originality, self-reliance and experience
come into play decisively.

In the woollen districts of Great Britain the operatives are people
who have been in the trade all their lives, whose parents and
grandparents have been in the trade before them. There is not only an
hereditary aptitude but an hereditary interest. There is not only an
individual interest but an interest of the whole community. The
welfare of a town or city is wrapped up in the woollen industry. This
is not so in Japan. The mill workers in the Tokyo prefecture, for
example, come from remote parts of Japan, and the girls--and
three-quarters of the employees of the woollen industry are girls--are
merely on a three-years contract. The girls arrive absolutely
inexperienced. Even in England it is considered that it takes two or
three years to make a worker skilful. Within the three-years period
for which the Japanese mill girls or their parents contract, as many
as 30 per cent.