turing interests, but in that case the law should at least
require a gradual and steady approach to model conditions--a distinct
step forward each six months until at the end of three years, or five
years at longest, every state should have a law as good as that of
Massachusetts.

Tokyo, Japan.

{34}

V

DOES JAPANESE COMPETITION MENACE THE WHITE MAN'S TRADE?

I

With all the markets of the Orient right at Japan's doors and labor to
be had for a mere song--four fifths of her cotton-factory workers,
girls and women averaging 13-1/2 cents a day, and the male labor
averaging only 22 cents--it is simply useless for Europe and America
to attempt to compete with her in any line she chooses to monopolize.
Now that she has recovered from her wars, she will doubtless forge to
the front as dramatically as an industrial power as she has already
done as a military and maritime power, while other nations, helpless
in competition, must simply surrender to the Mikado-land the lion's
share of Asiatic trade--the richest prize of twentieth-century
commerce.

In some such strain as this prophets of evil among English and
American manufacturers have talked for several years. For the last few
months, professing to see in Japan's adoption of a high protective
tariff partial confirmation of their predictions, they have assumed
added authority. Their arguments, too, are so plausible and the facts
as to Japan's low wage scale so patent that the world has become
acutely interested in the matter. I account myself especially
fortunate, therefore, in having been able to spend several weeks under
peculiarly favorable circumstances in a first-hand study of Japanese
industrial {35} conditions. I have been in great factories and
business offices; I have talked with both Japanese and foreign
manufacturers who employ laborers by the thousand; I have had the
views of the most distinguished financial leaders of the empire as
well as of the great captains of industry; I have talked with several
men who have served in the Emperor's cabinet, including one who has
stood next to the Mikado himself in power; and at the same time I have
taken pains to get the views of English and American consular
officials, commercial attaches and travelers, and of newspaper men
both foreign and native.

And yet after having seen the big factories and the little
factory-workers in Tokyo and Osaka, after having listened to the most
ambitious of Japan's industri