Many of the conditions of industrial workers even in the United States to-day are heartrending in the extreme. Who could read of the strike of the shirt-waist makers of New York in the winter of 1909-10 without deep indignation over the conditions under which those brave girls worked, and against which they rebelled? The National Committee on Child Labor reported in the spring of 1911 that there were over 60,000 children in the factories of the United States, mostly in the South. Before condemning Japan unduly, Occidentals should remember that their own record is none too bright.
If comparison is to be made however between Japan and the West, it may be made along other lines. The West fell into its industrial difficulties with no example from which to learn. But this is not true of Japan. She can easily learn the lesson of a century of Western experience; but she seems slow to do it. Then again in Japan it is the government that is feebly leading, and the official popular representatives who are both blind and resisting, whereas in the West the great movements for industrial reform are movements of the people themselves, backed up and oftentimes led by enlightened humanitarian and Christian popular opinion. In the West, the churches are fairly in line with forward social movements, whereas in Japan, Shintoism, Confucianism, and even Buddhism are apparently wholly indifferent to the economic and even ethical condition of the nation's toilers. Furthermore, we are seeing to-day in Japan the strange phenomenon of one section of the government seeking to ameliorate social and economic conditions, and at the same time another, seemingly mortally afraid of allowing the people either to discuss these matters or to attempt reform movements themselves. Labor unions are strictly forbidden, and any person advocating socialism is under strict police surveillance. Strikes are illegal and their promoters are liable to criminal punishment. Anomalous as it may be, the government seems to be seeking to destroy that enlightened popular opinion on which it must rely for the efficient enforcement of its own plans for social betterment of the working classes.
I have dwelt at considerable length on the conditions of factory workers, for later on I shall describe a sociological experiment among this class.