I do not think that some of the factory proprietors are conscious that they are taking undue advantage of their employees.  These men are just average persons at the ante-Shaftesbury stage of responsibility towards labour.[144] Their case is that the girls are pitifully poor and that the factories supply work at the ruling market rates for the work of the pitifully poor.  Said one factory owner to me genially:  “Peasant families are accustomed to work from daylight to dark.  In the silk-worm feeding season they have almost no time for sleep.  Peasant people are trained to long hours.  Lazy people might suffer from the long hours of the factory, but the factory girls are not lazy.”

It hardly needs to be pointed out that there is all the difference between a long day at the varied work of a farm, even in the trying silk-worm season, and a long day, for nine or ten months on end, sitting still, with the briefest intervals for food, in the din and heat of a factory.  Such a life must be debilitating.  When it is added that in most factories, in the short period between supper and sleep, and again during the night, the girls are closely crowded, no further explanation is wanted of the origin of the tuberculosis which is so prevalent in the villages which supply factory labour.[145] There is no question that in the scanty moments the girls do have for an airing most of them are immured within the compounds of their factories.  A large proportion of the many thousands of factory girls[146] who are to be mothers of a new generation in the villages are passing years of their lives in conditions which are bad for them physically and morally.  It must not be forgotten that very many of the girls go to the factories before they are fully grown.  On the question of morality, evidence from disinterested quarters left no doubt on my mind that the morale of the girls was lowered by factory life.  The Lancashire factory girl goes home every evening and she has her Saturday afternoon and her Sunday, her church or chapel, her societies and clubs, her amusements and her sweetheart.  Her Japanese sister has none of this natural life and she has infinitely worse conditions of labour.

It is only fair to remember, however, that the Japanese factory girl comes from a distance.  She has no relatives or friends in the town in which she is working.  But the plea that she would get into trouble if she were allowed her liberty without control of any sort does not excuse her present treatment.  If the factories offered decent conditions of life not a few of the companies would get at their doors most of the labour they need and many of the girls would live at home.  If the factories insist on having cheap rural labour then they should do their duty by it.  The girls should have reasonable working hours, proper sleeping accommodation and proper opportunities inside and outside the factories for recreation and moral and mental improvement.  It is idle to suggest that fair treatment of this sort is impossible.  It is perfectly possible.