Let us turn from the sheep problem to the factory problem.  What are the difficulties of the woollen industry?  In the first place, as we have seen, there is no home supply of wool worth mentioning.  Further, there is the intricacy of woollen manufacture.  Cotton machinery has been brought to such a pitch of perfection for every operation and there are in existence so many technical manuals for every department of cotton manufacture that a certain standardisation of output is not difficult.  The problem of woollen manufacture is much more complicated.  The output cannot be similarly standardised, and there are many directions in which originality, self-reliance and experience come into play decisively.

In the woollen districts of Great Britain the operatives are people who have been in the trade all their lives, whose parents and grandparents have been in the trade before them.  There is not only an hereditary aptitude but an hereditary interest.  There is not only an individual interest but an interest of the whole community.  The welfare of a town or city is wrapped up in the woollen industry.  This is not so in Japan.  The mill workers in the Tokyo prefecture, for example, come from remote parts of Japan, and the girls—­and three-quarters of the employees of the woollen industry are girls—­are merely on a three-years contract.  The girls arrive absolutely inexperienced.  Even in England it is considered that it takes two or three years to make a worker skilful.  Within the three-years period for which the Japanese mill girls or their parents contract, as many as 30 per cent. leave the mills and, appalling fact, from 20 to 25 per cent. die.[268] Not more than 10 per cent. renew their three-years contract.  Therefore there is, at present at any rate, little real skilled labour in the factories.  Another difficulty is the absence of skilful wool sorters.  Even before the War a good wool sorter commanded in England from L3 to L4 a week.  One of the things which hampers the Japanese woollen industry is the prevalence of illness at the factories.  They must have, in consequence, about 25 per cent. more labour than is needed.

Generally one would say that the industry at its present stage is not only weak on the labour side,[269] but, where it is efficient, is skilful rather in imitation than in original design.  Everything produced is an imitation of foreign designs.  That is not an unnatural state of things, however, at the commencement of a new industry.

With regard to the old complaint of Japanese goods failing to come up to sample, the shortcoming is often due not to intentional dishonesty but simply to inability to produce a uniform product.  In one factory an order had to be filled by bringing together work from 300 different places.  The first delivery of the cloth produced for the Russian army was like the sample, but the later deliveries, though of excellent material, were not, for the simple reason that the precise raw materials for the required blending did not exist in Japan.