cheap." And
all my investigations have convinced me that the remark is as
applicable in Japan as it is in America or England.

The per capita wages of Japanese laborers here are, of course,
amazingly low. The latest 1910 statistics, as furnished by the
Department of Finance, indicate a daily wage (American money) of 40
cents for carpenters, 31-1/2 cents for shoemakers, 34 cents for
blacksmiths, 25-1/2 cents for compositors, 19-1/2 cents for male farm
laborers, and 22 cents for male weavers, and 12 cents for female. In
the cotton factories I visited, those of the better sort, the wages
run from 5 cents a day for the youngest children to 25 cents a day for
good women workers. In a mousselaine mill I was told that the average
wages were 22-1/2 cents, ranging from 10 cents to a maximum of 50
cents for the most skilled employees. And this, be it remembered, was
{37} for eleven hours' work and in a factory requiring a higher grade
of efficiency than the average.

But in spite of the fact that such figures as these were well known to
him, it was my host in the first Japanese house to which I was
invited--one of the Emperor's privy councillors, and a man of much
travel and culture who had studied commercial conditions at home and
abroad rather profoundly--who expressed the conclusion that Japanese
factory labor when reduced to terms of efficiency is not greatly
cheaper than European, an opinion which has since grown rather trite
in view of the number of times that I have heard it. "In the old
handicrafts and family industries to which our people have been
accustomed," my host declared, "we can beat the world, but the moment
we turn to modern industrial machinery on a large scale the newness of
our endeavor tells against us in a hundred hindering ways. Numbers of
times I have sought to work out some industrial policy which had
succeeded, and could not but have succeeded, in England, Germany, or
America, only to meet general failure here because of the unconsidered
elements of a different environment, a totally different stage of
industrial evolution. Warriors from the beginning and with a record
for continuous government unsurpassed by any European country, our
political and military achievements are but the fruitage of our long
history, but in industry we must simply wait through patient
generations to reach the stage represented by the Englishman,
Irishman, or German, who takes to machinery as if by instinct."

All my inv