The factory proprietors are no worse than many other people intent on money making.  But the silk industry, as I saw it, was exploiting, consciously or unconsciously, not only the poverty of its girl employees but their strength, morality, deftness[147] and remarkable school training in earnestness and obedience.  Several times I heard the unenlightened argument that, if there were a certain sacrifice of health and well-being, a rapidly increasing population made the sacrifice possible; that, as silk was the most valuable product in Japan, and it was imperative for the development and security of the Empire that its economic position should be strengthened, the sacrifice must be made.  Nothing need be said of such a hopelessly out-of-date and nationally indefensible attitude except this:  that it is doubtful whether any considerable proportion of the people connected with the silk industry have felt themselves specially charged with a mission to strengthen the economic condition of their country.  They have simply availed themselves of a favourable opportunity to make money.  That opportunity was presented by the cheap labour available in farmers’ daughters unprotected by effective trade unions, by properly administered factory laws or by public opinion.

II[148]

The enterprise, the efficiency and the profits shown by the sericultural industry have been remarkable, and not a few of the capitalists connected with it are personally public-spirited.  But many well-wishers of Japan, native-born and foreign, cannot help wondering what is the real as compared with the seeming return of the industry to a nation the strength of which is in its reservoir of rustic health and willingness.  It is significant of the extent to which the factories are working with cheap labour that, in a country in which there are more men than women,[149] there was in about 20,000 factories 58 per cent. of female labour.  If I stress the fact of female employment it is because in Japan nearly every woman eventually marries.  Enfeebled women must therefore hand on enfeeblement to the next generation.[150]

The Japanese, in their present factory system, as in other developments, insist on making for themselves all the mistakes that we have made and are now ashamed of.  In judging the Japanese let us remember that all our industrial exploitation of women[151] was not, as we like to believe, an affair as far off as the opening nineteenth century.  I do not forget as a young man filling a newspaper poster with the title of an article which recounted from my own observation the woes of women chain makers who, with bared breasts and their infants sprawling in the small coals, slaved in domestic smithies for a pittance.  And as I write it is announced that the head of the United States Steel Corporation says that “there is no necessity for trade unions,” which are, in his opinion, “inimical to the best interests of the employers and the public.”  That is precisely the view of most Japanese factory proprietaries.