homelier details of their people’s lives, social progress would have been indefinitely hastened, and we might have been spared the sorry spectacle of one industrial nation after another committing the blunders and painfully learning the lesson of its predecessors at the cost of much avoidable human suffering.  For, in this matter of industrial legislation, as in many others, men are astonishingly slow to learn by example.  Perhaps the most remarkable case in point that has occurred is that of Japan, at this hour still in course of being worked out before our eyes.  Here we have a nation brimful of intelligence, quick of apprehension, with a genius for selecting from the polity and procedure of other States exactly those features best fitted to promote prosperity and efficiency and an unmatched power for assimilating and reproducing them in the form suitable to its own tradition of development, following the Western Powers along the crooked path of their early dealings with industrialism and allowing the very conditions which stunted and degraded the Lancashire cotton operative of the ’thirties to be created in the mills of Osaka.

Since the days of Owen ideals of industrial conditions have mightily grown and developed.  This was inevitable, since the standards of social comfort and hygiene have undergone complete transformation during the last century.  But the important points to note are, first, that it is not only ‘reformers’ who put forward these ideals, but that they have become to a large extent common to all classes of the people, and, secondly, that the raising of the standard which proceeded at a slow, irregular rate for, roughly speaking, a hundred years, quickening in one decade and remaining almost stationary during the next, is now proceeding with comparative rapidity.  Already such a rate of mortality and sickness as was common in the trades technically called dangerous twenty years ago has come to be regarded as monstrous and would no longer be tolerated with patience.  This acceleration in the raising of industrial standards is doubtless largely due to the conscious participation of the workers themselves in the business of providing for their own protection; but it may also be referred in some degree to a quickened conscience and a more intelligent appreciation of the importance of the manual worker in the national economy on the part of the public as a whole.  The same movement has been taking place, in different degrees according to their differing circumstances, among the other industrial peoples of the Old World and the New.  The quicker this advance on the part of some nations the more keenly was the failure of others to make progress in the same ratio felt by those belonging to the first group.  An uneasy consciousness that the backward nations were beginning to constitute an obstacle to progressive domestic legislation on the part of the advanced nations began to manifest itself.  It appeared that the lame ducks were setting the pace for the whole fleet, and it was seen that self-defence no less than concern for the welfare of the human race at large demanded the devising of some machinery by which the movements of these laggards should be quickened.