according to official figures, 99,000 female factory operatives under
fifteen years of age and 2,400 under twelve. Some 20,000 of these
children were employed in silk factories. What protection have they?
Before passing this page for the press I have shown it to a
well-informed Japanese friend and he says that he has never seen any
newspaper report of a prosecution under the Factory Law. Obviously a
Factory Law under which no one is ever prosecuted is not
operative.[153]

It is excellent that Japan has sent a large permanent delegation to
Switzerland to establish a system of liaison with the International
Labour Office of the League of Nations. This company of young men will
keep the Japanese Government well informed. There is undoubtedly in
Japan, under Western influence, a steady development of sensitiveness
to working-class conditions and a rapid growth of modern social
ideas. But the Government and the Diet will not step out far in
advance of general opinion, the most will naturally be made by the
authorities and trade interests of bad factory conditions on the
Continent of Europe and in some industries in the United States, and
the majority of a public which has been carefully nurtured in the
belief that a profitable industrialism is the great desideratum for
Japan will not be restive. Real factory reform is not to be expected
until an enlightened view is taken by Japanese in general of the
exploitation of girls for any purpose. It is not in commercial human
nature, Eastern or Western, that factory directors and shareholders
should forgo without a struggle the advantage of possessing cheaper
and more subjected labour than their foreign rivals. Some influence
may be exerted in the right direction by the fact that those who are
profiting by cheap and docile labour may themselves be undersold
before long by cheaper and still more docile labour in China.[154] And