it has so worked thus far with amazing success. Japan is
producing without capital, in our large sense of the word. She
has become industrial without becoming essentially mechanical and
artificial The vast rice crop is raised upon millions of tiny,
tiny farms; the silk crop, in millions of small poor homes, the
tea crop, on countless little patches of soil. If you visit Kyoto
to order something from one of the greatest porcelain makers in
the world, one whose products are known better in London and in
Paris than even in Japan, you will find the factory to be a
wooden cottage in which no American farmer would live. The
greatest maker of cloisonne vases, who may ask you two hundred
dollars for something five inches high, produces his miracles
behind a two-story frame dwelling containing perhaps six small
rooms. The best girdles of silk made in Japan, and famous
throughout the Empire, are woven in a house that cost scarcely
five hundred dollars to build. The work is, of course,
hand-woven. But the factories weaving by machinery--and weaving
so well as to ruin foreign industries of far vaster capacity--are
hardly more imposing, with very few exceptions. Long, light, low
one-story or two-story sheds they are, about as costly to erect
as a row of wooden stables with us. Yet sheds like these turn out
silks that sell all round the world. Sometimes only by inquiry,
or by the humming of the machinery, can you distinguish a factory
from an old yashiki, or an old-fashioned Japanese school
building,--unless indeed you can read the Chinese characters over
the garden gate. Some big brick factories and breweries exist;
but they are very few, and even when close to the foreign
settlements they seem incongruities in the landscape.

Our own architectural monstrosities and our Babels of machinery