ica, rather
spoiled his enthusiasm for getting his ship coaled at Nagasaki for
7-1/2 cents a ton, by acknowledging that if it rained he should have
to keep his ship waiting a day to get sufficient hands.

Moreover, while the Japanese factory workers are forced into longer
hours than labor anywhere else--eleven hours at night this week,
eleven hours in the day next week--I am convinced that the people as a
whole are more than ordinarily averse to steady, hard, uninterrupted
toil. "We have a streak of the Malay in us," as a Japanese professor
said to me, "and we like to idle now and then. The truth is our people
are not workers; they are artists, and artists must not be hurried."
Certainly in the hurried production of the factory the Japanese
artistic taste seems to break down almost beyond redemption, and the
people seem unable to carry their habits of neatness and carefulness
into the new environment of European machinery. "Take the Tokyo street
cars," said an ex-cabinet officer to me; "the wheels are seldom or
never cleaned or oiled, and are half eaten by rust." The railroads are
but poorly kept up; the telephones exhaust your patience; while in the
case of telegraphing, your exasperation is likely to lose itself in
amazed amusement. A few days ago, for example, I sent a telegram from
Osaka to Kobe, took my rickshaw across town, waited for a slow train
to start, and then reached Kobe and the street destination of my
message before it did.

In considering the failure of Japanese labor to bring forth a
satisfactory output, however, one thing more should be said, and that
is that we should not put the blame wholly on the {41} wage-earner.
Not a small proportion of the responsibility lies at the door of
inexpert managers. The family system of production has not only been
the rule for generations with that minority of the people not engaged
in farming, but it is still the dominant type of Japanese industry,
and it will take time even to provide opportunities for training a
sufficient corps of superintendents in the larger lines of production.

In further illustration of my argument that cheap labor is not proving
so abnormally profitable, I may question whether Japanese factories
have paid as good dividends, in proportion to prevailing rates of
interest on money, as factories in England and America. Baron
Shibusawa, the dean of Japanese financiers and one of the pioneers in
cotton manufacturing, is my authority for the s