is a proof of the prescience of Robert Owen that, even before he had
succeeded in planting the first small seed which was to grow into the
flourishing tree of British industrial legislation, he had grasped the
necessity and formulated the demand for international action in the
matter of Factory Laws. Owen's labours at home have, naturally enough,
bulked so large in the estimation of historians and publicists in their
writings on this subject, that the continental side of his activities
has received comparatively little attention at their hands.
Nevertheless his correspondence with European governments on the abuses
and needs of industrialism as it existed in the early years of the
nineteenth century are among the most remarkable he ever wrote; and his
appeal to the Congress of the Holy Alliance in 1818 shows how thoroughly
prepared he was to treat national reform as the first step to a system
which should be international. Had the statesmen of his time, too busy
in their making and unmaking of kingdoms to heed his arguments and
appeals, turned their attention from those high matters (in which, after
all, their achievement was for the most part neither brilliant nor
beneficial) to the homelier details of their people's lives, social
progress would have been indefinitely hastened, and we might have been
spared the sorry spectacle of one industrial nation after another
committing the blunders and painfully learning the lesson of its
predecessors at the cost of much avoidable human suffering. For, in this
matter of industrial legislation, as in many others, men are
astonishingly slow to learn by example. Perhaps the most remarkable case
in point that has occurred is that of Japan, at this hour still in
course of being worked out before our eyes. Here we have a nation
brimful of intelligence, quick of apprehension, with a genius for
selecting from the polity and procedure of other States exactly those
features best fitted to promote prosperity and efficiency and an
unmatched power for assimilating and reproducing them in the form
suitable to its own tradition of development, following the Western
Powers along the crooked path of their early dealings with industrialism
and allowing the very conditions which stunted and degraded the
Lancashire cotton operative of the 'thirties to be created in the mills
of Osaka.

Since the days of Owen ideals of industrial conditions have mightily
grown and developed. This was inevitable, sin