need not be repeated in Japan, but whether that wisdom will be
displayed in time is doubtful. The Japanese commercial world has been
commendably quick to learn in many directions in the West. It will be
a serious reflection on the intelligence of the country if the lessons
of the industrial acerbities of Europe and the United States should
not be grasped. Meantime it is a duty which the foreign observer owes
to Japan to speak quite plainly of attempts as silly as they are
useless[155] to obscure the lamentable condition of a large proportion
of Japanese workers, to hide the immense profits which have been made
by their employers and to pretend that factory laws have only to be
placed on the statute book in order to be enforced. But if he be
honest he must also recognise the handicap of specially costly
equipment[156] and of unskilled labour and inexperience under which
the Japanese business world is competing for the place in foreign
trade to which it has a just claim. Such conditions do not in the
least excuse inhumanity, but they help to explain it.

FOOTNOTES:

[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