al leaders, I shall leave the country
convinced of the folly of the talk that white labor cannot compete
with Japanese labor. I believe indeed that the outlook is encouraging
for manufacturing in the Mikado's empire, but I do not believe that
this development is to be regarded as a menace to English or American
industry. Any view to the contrary, it seems to me, must be based upon
a radical misconception of conditions as they are.

In the very outset, the assumed parallel between Japan's rise as a
military power and her predicted rise as an industrial power should be
branded as the groundless non sequitur that it is. "All our present
has its roots in the past," as my first Japanese acquaintance said to
me, and we ignore fundamental facts when we forget that for centuries
unnumbered Japan existed for the soldier, as the rosebush for the
blossom. The man of martial courage was the goal of all her striving,
the end of all her travail. Society was a military aristocracy, the
Samurai the privileged class. And at the same time commerce was
despised as dishonorable and industry merely tolerated as a necessary
evil. In the Japan of Yalu, Liao-yang, and Mukden we have no modern
Minerva springing full-armed from the head of Jove, but rather an
unrecognized Ulysses {36} of ancient skill surprising onlookers merely
ignorant of the long record of his prowess. Viewed from the same
historical standpoint, however, industrial Japan is a mere learner,
unskilled, with the long and weary price of victory yet to pay.

In the race she has to run, moreover, the Mikado-land has no such
advantages as many of our people have been led to believe. In America
it has long been my conviction that cheap labor is never cheap; that
so-called "cheap labor" is a curse to any community--not because it is
cheap but because it is inefficient. The so-called cheap negro labor
in the South, for example, I have come to regard as perhaps the
dearest on the continent. Here in Japan, however, I was quite prepared
to find that this theory would not hold good. By reason of conditions
in a primitive stage of industrial organization, I thought that I
might find cheap labor with all the advantages, in so far as there are
any, and few of the disadvantages, encountered elsewhere. But it is
not so. An American factory owner in Osaka, summing up his Job's
trials with raw Japanese labor, used exactly my own phrase in a
newspaper article a few days ago, "Cheap labor is never