From the time you land in
Yokahoma your heart is made sick by the sight of half-naked
human-beings harnessed like oxen to heavily laden carts and drays.
Bent, tense, and perspiring like slaves at the oar, they draw their
heavy burdens through the streets. One or two men wearily pull an
immense telegraph pole balanced on a two-wheeled truck. Eight or ten
men are harnessed together dragging some merchant's heavy freight.
Four to a dozen other men carry some heavy building-stone or piece of
machinery by running bamboo supports from the shoulders of the men
behind to the shoulders of the men in front: you can see the constant,
tortuous play of the muscles around each man's rigid backbone while
the strained, monotonous, half-weird chorus, "Hy-ah! Hullah! Hee-ah!
Hey!" measures their tread and shifts the strain from man to man, step
by step, with the precision of clock work. On the rivers in China,
too, one sees boats run by human treadmill power: a harder task than
that of Sisyphus is that of the men who sweat all day long at the
wheel, forever climbing and never advancing.

Nor do the women and children of the Orient escape burdens such as
only men's strong shoulders should bear. Children who should have the
freedom that even the young colt gets--how my heart has gone out to
them cheated out of the joys {177} of childhood! And the women with
children strapped on their backs while they steer boats and handle
passengers and traffic about Hong Kong! Or leave, if you will, the
water-front at Hong Kong and make the hard climb up the steep,
bluff-like, 1800-foot mountainside, dotted with the handsome
residences of wealthy Englishmen: you can hardly believe that every
massive timber, every ton of brick, every great foundation-stone was
carried up, up from the town below, by the tug and strain of human
muscle--and not merely human muscle, but in most cases the muscles of
women! Probably no governor in any state in America lives in a
residence so splendid as that of the governor-general of Hong
Kong--certainly no governor's residence is so beautifully situated,
halfway up a sheer mountain-slope--and yet the wife of the
governor-general told me that the material used in the building was
brought up the mountainside by women!

Hardly better fare the women in the factories. I mentioned in a former
letter the mills in Shanghai where women work 13-1/4 hours for 12
cents a day; and in most cases the women in Eastern factories are
herded