ade goods, and where we must
face the competition of the foremost industrial nations of the world.
As our cost of production increases, our competition with Europe will
become steadily more difficult and a decrease in our exports will
surely follow. It is folly for one small island to try to produce
everything it needs. The tariff on iron, for example, can only hamper
every new industry by increasing the cost of machinery, and must
especially hinder navigation and shipbuilding, in which we have made
such progress." Not a few of the country's foremost vernacular dailies
are as outspoken as Count Okuma on this point, and the Kobe
_Chronicle_ declares that, with diminished exports to Japan, "British
manufacturers will find compensation in the lessened ability of the
Japanese to compete in China; and Japan will find that she has raised
prices against herself and damaged her own efficiency."

That such will be the net result of Japan's new policy seems to me to
admit of no question. Unfortunately, certain special lines of British
and American manufacture may suffer, but, on the whole, what the white
man's trade loses in Japan will be recompensed for in China and India.
Even after Japan's adoption of the moderately protective tariff of
1899 her export of yarns to China--in the much discussed "market right
at her doors"--dropped from a product of 340,000 bales to a recent
average of 250,000 bales. From 1899 to 1908, according to the latest
published government figures, the number of employees in Japanese
cotton factories increased only 240--one third of 1 per cent.--or from
73,985 to 74,225, to be exact, while I have already alluded to the
figures showing the {46} comparative English and Japanese imports of
raw cotton from 1890 to 1909 as furnished me by Mr. Robert Young, of
Kobe, Japan in this period going from $30,000,000 to $54,000,000, or
77 per cent., while England's advance was from $135,000,000 to
$300,000,000, or 122 per cent. The increase in England's case, of
course, was largely, and in Japan's case almost wholly, due to the
increased price of the cotton itself, but the figures are none the
less useful for the purposes of comparison.

In the frequent attempts of the Japanese Government to stimulate
special industries by subsidies and special privileges there is, it
seems to me, equally as little danger to the trade of Europe and
America in general (though here, too, special industries may suffer
now and then), beca