[144] It is a chastening exercise to read before proceeding with this Chapter an extract from Spencer Walpole’s History of England, vol. iii, p. 317, under the year 1832:  “The manufacturing industries of the country were collected into a few centres.  In one sense the persons employed had their reward:  the manufacturers gave them wages.  In another sense their change of occupation brought them nothing but evil.  Forced to dwell in a crowded alley, occupying at night a house constructed in neglect of every known sanitary law, employed in the daytime in an unhealthy atmosphere and frequently on a dangerous occupation, with no education available for his children, with no reasonable recreation, with the sky shrouded by the smoke of an adjoining capital, with the face of nature hidden by a brick wall, neglected by an overworked clergyman, regarded as a mere machine by an avaricious employer, the factory operative turned to the public house, the prize ring or the cockpit.”

[145] See Appendix XL.

[146] Number of factory workers, a million and a half, of whom 800,000 are females.  For statistics of women workers, see Appendix XLI.

[147] The Minister of Commerce has himself stated that the sericultural industry is rooted in the dexterity of the Japanese countrywoman.

[148] This section of the Chapter was written in 1921.

[149] In Japan in 1918 there were, per 1,000, 505.2 men to 494.8 women.

[150] Of the workers under the age of fifteen in the 20,000 factories, 82 per cent. were girls.  The statistics in this paragraph were issued by the Ministry of Commerce in 1917.

[151] For sketches of women and children (with a chain between their legs) harnessed to coal wagons in the pits, see Parliamentary Papers, vol. xv, 1842.  “There is a factory system grown up in England the most horrible that imagination can conceive,” wrote Sir William Napier to Lady Hester Stanhope two years after Queen Victoria’s accession.  “They are hells where hundreds of children are killed yearly in protracted torture.”  In Torrens’s Memoirs of the Queen’s First Prime Minister, one reads:  “Melbourne had a Bill drawn which with some difficulty he persuaded the Cabinet to sanction, prohibiting the employment of children under 9 in any except silk mills.”

[152] More than 200 books on Socialism were published in 1920.

[153] For a declaration by Dr. Kuwata concerning bad food and “defiance of hygienic rules,” see Appendix XLII.

[154] See Appendix XLIII.

[155] See Appendix XLII.

[156] In a pre-War publication of the United States Department of Commerce it was stated that the cost of cotton mills per spindle is in England 32s., in the United States 44s., in Germany 52s., and in Japan 100s.

[Illustration:  ARCHERY AT AN AGRICULTURAL SCHOOL. p. 158]

[Illustration:  CULTIVATION OF THE HILLSIDE. p. 148]