In 1911 Japan’s tariff agreements expired and a new high tariff was put into effect in the effort to raise $300,000,000 a year as the state’s revenue. The same result was experienced as in India. Home manufacturers operated in the smaller industries, and many larger foreign capitalists opened Japanese branches. For instance, the Lever Soap Company, of England, came to Osaka, and the Armstrong-Vickers-Maxim Company, of Newcastle, the gun-founders and warship builders, came to Muroran in Ezo Island, to be near the coal mines, the iron ore being imported largely from Tayeh, China, and much of the pig iron from Hanyang, China. Prices of living have advanced beyond wages, and in 1912 the municipalities of Tokio, etc., had to open free rice kitchens to feed crowds of the impoverished and unemployed. The poor bear the heaviest share of the new taxes and the increased prices levied by the trusts. The profits of some of the large trusts go out of the country. There is the same complaint as in China, that foreign capital and home monopoly are exploiting franchises, subsidy chests and tariffs. The new high tariff is a success for the monopolists, just as the American tariff was from 1865 to 1911. The complaint among the people of the privilege-made-wealth running the government and burdening the taxpayer is as bitter as in some other countries. The suffrage being limited in Japan to five millions out of sixty million people, this discontent does not yet show itself so quickly as in America and Britain. American and British newspapers, magazines and books which voice reform, and real and not deputized representation of the taxed, are translated, and widely read, not only in Japan, but in China.

The world knows the effective work of the Japanese press bureau, organized with the aid of foreign advisers, before the Japan-Russia War. This included the publication of Professor Nitobe’s book on Bushido in Philadelphia, glorifying to the highest pitch of the warm Oriental imagination everything Japanese. This had much to do with preparing the way for the Japanese advance in Manchuria. That press bureau has been strengthened, and has its inspired organs in some of the large cities of the Occident. No other country is able to color the news on occasions as Japan is able. With the cry of lÈse majestÉ, Japan, Germany and Russia seem to be successful in stamping out much of the independent criticism of the taxed, or those to whom equal opportunity has been denied. There seems to be only one hope for real liberty in Japan and elsewhere, the rise again, as in Bunyan’s, Milton’s and Franklin’s time, of the independent pamphlet and book, whose one motto shall be, “No taxation without real representation.”

The Japanese have appointed the Koreans, Count Yi and Viscount Cho, to represent the absorbed Korean people, and these two men are expected to sign every document praising the rule of the Japanese, which document is then wired over the world by the thoroughly organized press agency. The former immense missionary influence of the Americans among the common people is slowly being choked out, and the large foreign gold and other mining industries of Korea, which promised so well, are also now under strict watch. In other words, the system of dummification has been applied to Korean politics, and the famous American teachers and political advisers have found it well to leave the peninsula. I would instance the long articles in the New York Times of June 6, 1912, and the New York Herald of September 1, 1912, in which the American Presbyterian and other churches charge the Japanese bureaucracy with wholesale persecution, “planting” of evidence, imprisonment and torture of thousands of Korean political prisoners as late as 1912. Two methods of colonization face each other in contrast at the threshold of China—the Japanese method in Korea, and the American method in the Philippines. Both are progressing commercially, but the latter alone is progressing educationally and altruistically, so far. It is noticeable in Korea that the Japanese are breaking down many beautiful walls and temples to build in their place ugly utilitarian houses. They pay very little respect to those whom they have conquered. They are obliterators of art, where art detains utility. The name of the land has been changed to Chosen. In Manchuria, despite conventions, the Japanese maintain ten times the railway guard of soldiers agreed upon. Japan will bear friendly watching everywhere, as the American writers, Millard and Homer Lea, are constantly urging. Her armaments cost her a heavy taxation and she is searching for ways to recoup herself. If Manchuria is to be saved to China, it will be owing more to America’s insistence than to Britain, for Britain at present is tied up to Japan, and Britain in India has given a hostage to the East. Perhaps the best way to save Manchuria is to encourage Chinese emigration, and this plan is now working out, tens of thousands of Shangtungese leaving yearly for the three rich Manchurian provinces. The American suggestion that the Russian and Japanese railways in Manchuria should be made international is possibly not so good a plan as to sell those roads to China with money loaned for the purpose, and clean Manchuria of Russian and Japanese troops. There seems no permanent reason why China should not run Manchurian railways and mines as well and as profitably as she has run the North China Railway and the Kaiping mine of Pechili province. To illustrate how Chinese officialdom looks upon the general subject, I quote from Viceroy Liu Ming Chuan’s memorial, approved by Li Hung Chang, written in 1893: “Japan attempts now and again to be arrogant—like a mantis when it assumes an air of defiance—and to despise China, and gives us no small amount of trouble on the smallest pretext.”

The advance party has its critics in Japan. The Tokio Nichi, the Osaka Mainichi, the Tokio Jiji and the Tokio Yorodzu take the nation to task for attempting to compete with America’s navy. They cry out against the expansionists’ slogan of “Japan’s supremacy on the Pacific”. Here is the Yorodzu’s plaint against the heavy taxes involved: “Go to the hamlets and villages, and you find the sons of our soil wearing the sad and worn appearance of the ‘man with the hoe’. Ask the shopkeepers and merchants, and they tell you that they are at a loss to know how to make ends meet. So do small manufacturers and men of moderate salaries, and in fact all who come under the general term of the middle class. Why? What else but that their taxes are too heavy, and because the price of commodities has risen too high since the war? The war has increased the wealth only of the contractors, speculators, and a small group of millionaires, which accounts for the sudden rise of the prices of the necessaries of life. Thus the chasm between the poor and the rich is widening every day. What will become of the country if the government does not bend all its energies to the recuperation of our national strength, which has been overtaxed during and since the late war? The only course which the government should follow at this critical moment is to curtail all the unnecessary expenses of administration, most of all, those of the army and navy.” This succinctly covers what volumes could not cover better. The average Japanese income is twenty-three dollars gold a year, out of which one-fifth goes to taxes.

Freight rates and tariffs are in some places as powerful as battleships and battalions in keeping out the commerce of a rival. When Japan and Russia rejected America’s proposition for an international control of Manchurian railways, so that the commerce of all nations would pay the same duty and receive the same car supply in Manchuria, Japan and Russia made a secret treaty regarding Manchuria on July 4, 1910, and another agreement in 1912. Among other points, it covered interchange rates. The Russian railways can by high rates keep out competitive Japanese goods, and the Japanese railways can retaliate. On non-competitive goods needed for local consumption, low through rates are accorded, Japan favoring the famous Harbin flour, timber, kaoliang spirits from the Harbin distilleries, and Amur salmon and fish. Russia accords low rates northward to Japanese (i.e., Fushun and Yentai) coal, cement, fresh food, etc. On export competitive soybeans, for instance, by low rates Japan tries to coax Russian shipments southward via Dairen, and Russia makes a similar effort to route Japanese-controlled beans via Vladivostok, but should a Russian shipper try to send ten miles in the direction of Japanese-owned Dairen he would find the soy rate higher than all the five hundred miles to Vladivostok.

By indirect methods, such as loans at low interest, rebated godown charges, rebated rates, and what not (for where there’s a will there’s a way) Japan can militate against the competition of American and British cottons, woolens, machinery, etc., in Manchuria. When the Chinese junks on the Liao River compete in the open season for the soy-bean traffic for Newchwang, the Japanese railways quote as low a rate as five mills per ton mile to Dalny, as compared with the lowest rate in America of eight mills. Japan is a David when she goes out to slay! Japan was the whole cause of the denial by China of an American-financed and constructed railway from Chin Wang Tao through Manchuria northward to Aigun. Yet she says she doesn’t mean to stay in Manchuria! She did not broad-gage Kuroki’s difficult Antung-Mukden railway recently in such a permanent way as to suggest that she ever intended to retire or sell out, “treaties and conventions notwithstanding,” to use the apt phrase of the London Times. Though America would under no circumstances accept a square foot of land in China or Manchuria, except on lease in an international municipal settlement, America must protect her growing and potential trade in Manchuria and in China, and that trade will always be withstood in one way or another by Japan. There is nothing now to go to war about, but there will always be a good deal to argue about, and Japan, as well as the Manchus, knows a dozen ways of presenting a smiling evasion. Have you ever proposed a difficult question to a Japanese at a curio auction, and watched his face! We have all voted that he was a success in making language hide thought; a born diplomat.

The Japanese government debt outstanding is £300,000,000, as compared with China’s debt of £93,000,000, and Japan’s industrials have borrowed privately abroad an added £60,000,000.

Great as is Japan’s debt, she can make heavy payments on it because she owns her railways, and can allot the railway surplus to the diminishing of the debt, which China and India can also do because of the nationalization of most of the railways.

In April, 1912, the Lodge Resolution in the American Senate brought out the fact that a Japanese trans-Pacific steamship company, acting doubtless on behalf of the Japan forward party, had long been endeavoring to obtain from Mexico a strategic base on Magdalena Bay, which could, as a coaling station, threaten the whole Pacific coast. How would Japan like it if America obtained a coaling station in Manchuria? She and Russia compelled China to refuse America a railway franchise in Pechili in 1910.

What is the comparative strength of the American and Japanese navies? The German specialist, Count von Reventlow, and the American, Homer Lea, who accompanied Sun Yat Sen to China as military adviser, though he is not a military man, have in several books prophesied that Japan will and can defeat America. Japan has four dreadnoughts, the Settsu, Kawachi, Aki and Satsuma, completed since the Russia War, but they have only half the gun-power of the ten American superdreadnoughts. Japan has eight battleships of the 15,000-ton Mikasa type, including the salvaged and repaired Russian ships, against America’s thirty battleships of the first class. America can therefore patrol the Pacific from a Philippine base as soon as she has docks enough, and if America and Britain ever approximate on world questions, the British navy can be drawn to the Atlantic and waters west of Ceylon. Two things are sure: first, that America and Britain will never fight each other; and second, that Britain’s and America’s commercial and political policies in the East are identical in destiny. As long as America maintains a two-power standard on the Pacific, that is, two ships to one of Japan’s she need fear no opposition from Japan, and Japan has certainly nothing to fear from America, as China ceaselessly praises the altruistic and non-land-grabbing policy of America over the world. It is true that Japan has an almost irresistible army, but sea power dictates, as Admiral Mahan’s brilliant books show. Japan whipped Russia because she controlled the sea. If America controls the Pacific, the Japanese army could do nothing in Korea or Manchuria.

Now, as to Russia, the navies of America and Britain pounding on the Baltic door, if necessary, as a last resort, could make Russia behave in Manchuria; but if this did not prove wholly effective, a reformed Chinese army, trained by American and British officers, could in time do to the Russian battalions that were left what Oyama’s, Nogi’s and Kuroki’s regiments did. China should not yet be called upon to waste her money on a navy, as she has no interests for a century beyond the great countries of Turkestan, Mongolia and Manchuria, which America and Britain, with their navies, desire to enable her to retain. Britain and America should have a persistent, consistent policy, and there will be no naval war, the whole world over; and Germany can reduce her navy and army charges, which are a curse to her people. If Germany wants to do a noble work, let her use her army to influence parliamentary and sociological reforms in tyrannical Russia, where men are blighted by the curses of opinion-paralyzing detectivism and oligarchism. If a consistent, persistent policy is maintained there need no more be an Anglo-German feud on the Atlantic than an American-Japanese feud on the Pacific.

England needs a two-power navy because she has Africa, India and Atlantic Canada to defend. America needs a two-power Pacific navy because she has, as a foster mother of civilization, to help defend Australia, South America, the Philippines, Pacific Canada and republican China. Looked upon in this way, a navy becomes a policeman, and not a swashbuckler. Money is going to be invested to develop all these countries, and property should be protected, not looted. Those nations which have the most efficient naval police, and the most altruistic policies, are the nations which should patrol, and they are America, Britain and possibly Germany, if the last nation advances, as it seems now to be doing, in parliamentarism to real representation. America and Lloyd George’s Britain alone are essentially democracies, and therefore qualify in international altruism. With Britain’s control of the Suez Canal, and America’s ownership of the Panama Canal, efficiency is assured in these two nations effectively standing by to protect political progress and world commerce on a fuller and freer basis than it has ever been. In amenability and high mechanical intelligence, Britain, America and Germany alone have qualified in the management of navies.

Japan and America will not fight on the Pacific, as Count von Reventlow and Homer Lea prophesy, but America will overbuild Japan instead. Japan has been more carefully reading the new lesson taught by America and Britain that there must be no absorption of old China, and she is now thinking of a possible new rÔle, as the interpreter of the East to the West, and the West to the East. The head of the First Imperial College, Doctor Nitobe, the coiner of “Bushido”, is foremost in propagating this idea. Japanese school-teachers are most numerous in Chinese government schools, especially as teachers of English, in learning which, however, they are not half so expert as the Chinese themselves. Doctor Nitobe is a Christian.

At the time of the Japanese War, Professor Nitobe, then with the Tokio University, wrote a fanciful book on the theme, Bushido (Japanese pronunciation of “Wu Shih Tao”—way of warrior). It was quite on the style of Lafcadio Hearn’s apotheosis of the Japanese. Its effect in Japan was to produce some hysteria and not a little conceit. Foreigners were led to believe that the Japanese must be right because they were reckless. The Japanese bureaucracy of the Choshiu, Satsuma and other clans used the fetish to entrench themselves. No one can say that Japan has real representative government. Her government is exactly the government that Russia has. Her Diet is no more representative than is the Duma. The ministry decides on the budget, and it is put through by steam-roller when necessary, and ready-made opinion is given to the press. There is no such thing as the British parliamentary system of the commons absolutely controlling supply bills, or the American principle of the Lower House being finally supreme. The extensive press bureau which was established to popularize the Japan side of the Japan-Russia War, encouraged hara-kiri and telegraphed over the world in exaggerated terms the details of every hysterical and self-advertising suicide. For instance, if the warriors could not take the fort, instead of trying again, they were to march up and blow their brains out before the moving-picture film, so to speak, leaving a letter for the Mikado as follows: “We could not do what you asked us; it is our fault. Therefore in shame we hara-kiri. Bushido! Banzai, etc.” This thing is being kept up to a degree, and as long as it is encouraged by the bureaucracy, constitutional government in Japan will be postponed, the emperor being worshiped in his old office of pope of Kioto instead of constitutional emperor at Tokio.

I quote the following of many press despatches which constantly appear in the Japanese and world press: “To give his life as an atonement because the emperor of Japan had to spend an hour in a common waiting-room, Moji Shijiro Shimidzu, a trainmaster, threw himself under a train. Shimidzu had been in charge of arrangements for a journey the emperor made from Kyushu, after witnessing the army maneuvers. The imperial train was delayed by a derailment at a misplaced switch. Shimidzu left a letter saying that he considered it his duty to pay for the emperor’s embarrassment with his life.” The spectacular suicide of the immortal captor of Port Arthur, General Nogi, and his wife at the time of the funeral of the Mikado Mutsuhito on September 13, 1912, comes under the same category of godless savagery forbidden mankind by the Sixth Commandment of Sinai. It is time for Japan to cease posing through her press bureau. We all admire her for many sane and grand things done, and to tell the truth, we admire the Japanese people more than their present system of a privileged government where only five millions out of sixty millions enjoy the franchise. It is a government of the people, but not sufficiently a government for the people, and certainly not a government by all the people, all of which conditions Lincoln said should obtain if liberty was to be assured. That is the aim of the whole world, and it has been accomplished now in England, America, France, China, Portugal and Switzerland. The Shimidzus, who commit suicide, do not exhibit patriotism but hysterical conceit, and the thoroughly organized Japanese press bureau, and the Choshiu, Satsuma, and other privileged clans, in their own best interests, should discourage the nonsense; and instead of elevating the man as a god in the Shinto shrine, they should exhibit him in the foyer of fools. Christianity teaches that there is only one being for whom we should give our lives, and that anything else is idolatry. It is not the emperor or the president whom we are to serve, but the emperor’s men and women; the president’s men and women; that is, the state, and a real emperor and a real president must, too, serve the state, which is all the people. Such is the modern logic Japan should teach her people, and not the hysteria of Bushido. Japan is not ignorant of her disabilities, and each of the Seiyukei, Kokuminto and Yushinkai parties are endeavoring to extend the educational system which Guido Verbeck fashioned for the favored Satsuma, Choshiu, Fujiwara, Gen, Tosa, Hizen, Kago and other clans of five millions, to the forty-eight millions of agriculturalists, miners, factorymen and fishermen, and twelve million Koreans and Formosans. Success to Japan’s educational extension, is America’s and Britain’s hearty wish, for it “will calm a sea of troubles”.

Japan has been the first nation in the world to attack the land taxation question, and Germany and Britain have followed recently, a long way off, however, and America will probably also follow the example. Until recently the large estates held by barons and corporations have been taxed on the old feudal medieval system of an infinitesimal valuation, while the small holder has been taxed on the full selling value. This has now been changed, and large owners in Japan can not hold at little cost to await unearned increment. They must work the land or sell it. Until this system is adopted the poor of the nations will be decapitalized by tariff, food, clothing, building material, head, war, permit, excise, export, subsidy, educational and other high taxes. Land values are about one-tenth what they are in America, and the land tax is about eight per cent. on selling value. As in China under the Manchus, land in Japan is nominally the property of the emperor. Perpetual leases can only be owned outright by Japanese subjects, or by a company which is incorporated only in Japan. A foreigner in Japan can not own land, but his Japanese incorporated company can, as the land would then be at Japan’s command, Japan having no extraterritoriality exemption law favoring the foreigner, as has China, in civil and criminal matters.

As is well known, the police are an arm of the central government and not of the municipality, which savors of despotism and Russia’s example. There is therefore no really free press in Japan, for state trials may not be reported or commented on. The police exercise a censorship of news under their Marunouchi Club of Tokio. There could be no Roosevelts, Wilsons, Bryans and Lloyd Georges in Japan as in America and England!

They have their money trust question in Japan, for while there are thousands of small gathering banks, they all deposit in the trust banks, which thus control the use of “other people’s money”, i.e., credit. These large banks, whose presidents confer in the meetings of the “Eel Society”, are the Bank of Japan, Yokohama Specie Bank, Hypothec Bank, Japan Credit Mobilier, Hokkaido Colonial Bank, Bank of Formosa, Bank of Korea, and Mitsui’s Bank.

Japan must have its Gifford Pinchot somewhere. She has taken quick action against states’ rights when conservation was endangered. It was found that the provinces were selling water-power concessions to speculators and dummies of the monopolies. The central government in January, 1911, immediately suspended all provincial and colonial grants until a national survey could be made, and applicants looked into. It is proposed to harness several million horsepower of waterfalls on the Switzerland, and not the Niagara plan (so as not to mar the scenery), which, with cheap labor, will be a great asset of industrial Japan.

That Japan has taken up officially the correction of complaints which have been made in scores of books and hundreds of magazines on her trickiness and lack of commercial honor is shown in the following article by Minister of Commerce Oura, in the Jitsugyo no Nihon (Industrial Japan), written after his world tour, in which he praises the sturdy honesty of old free-trade England. “I could not help regretting to find that in commercial morality Japan was too young and weak to be classed among the world’s foremost countries. Everywhere I went I heard denunciations of and complaints against Japan. Japanese business men not being particular about commercial morality, people could not carry on business with our merchants with confidence. I soon felt ashamed on reflecting upon the fact that we Japanese had defects, subject to attacks and complaints in the matter of commercial morality. Our merchandise can not pass the customs authorities on a mere invoice, but is subjected to a rigorous examination. British merchandise is always more substantial than is advertised. In short, British-made goods never fail to justify their advertised description. Quite the opposite is the case with Japanese goods. Complaints are raised against Japanese manufactures that they are not up to sample. It is usual, for instance, for a layer of larger-sized fruit to be arranged on top of the box. Instances of overcharging, and tricky inferior imitations of standard goods are common, and damage our reputation.” Confession and contrition are the parents of reform, and Japan is waking up.

Japan worked her mines in 1911 to the following extent: Coal, 16,000,000 tons, value, $30,000,000; copper, 120,000,000 pounds, value $15,000,000; pig iron, 60,000 tons, value, $1,500,000 (Kamishi and Sennin mines); zinc ore, 22,000 pounds, value, $300,000; lead, 8,000,000 pounds, value, $250,000. The coal came from Japan mines only, and does not include the great product of the Fushun and Yentai mines in Manchuria. The copper was mined principally at the Kune, Kosaka, Ashio and Besshi mines at a cost of nine cents, which is lower than the American cost. Japan is exhausting the ore in the islands, and is, therefore, looking to rich Korea and China for her supply of this war and industrial necessity. Her need of copper is another incentive to expand politically.

Japan is building a railway along the western length of the main island, and will need $18,000,000 of railway equipment for it. She will probably go abroad for half of this. Small as Japan is, this railway will open up scenic and productive districts and add vastly to the riches and strategic resources of the country.

The method by which Japan built the Kobe harbor piers out into deep water was most modern. Cement boats, or caissons, one hundred and nineteen feet long, thirty-five feet high and thirty-four feet wide were built on a floating dock (planned by a Westminster, England, concern) at the shore. They were then conveyed to sea, the dock being sunk from under the cement boat. This latter was floated into position, and gradually sunk with cement, rubble and sand in the comparatively cheap but massive piers. A tonnage of 135,000 tons can be warped alongside the dredged sea walls at one time. It is not so long ago that everything had to be lightered out to the steamers in the wind-swept roadstead of Kobe, and many days were lost waiting for smooth water. The writer recalls being held at Kobe for eighteen hours during a typhonic blow because no launch or sanpan could bring off the passengers who had gone ashore during a calm. There are now no delays. There are power-driven cranes and travelers, godowns, and every facility for the quick handling of cargo. As at Montreal, Hamburg, Liverpool, Hongkong, etc., the government directly or indirectly assists, advances, or guarantees in securing the necessary harbor works, railway connection and dock machinery at Kobe. Kobe is Japan’s great import harbor, as Yokohama is her export harbor. Tokio is to be an export harbor, as a long canal for 10,000-ton ships is now being dredged to Yokohama Bay.

Japan’s petroleum is found in the Echigo district, straight across Hondo Island from Tokio. The oil is excellent for illuminating and lubricating, and the industry, which is highly protected, employs 3,300 people, and pays twenty-five per cent. to the Nippon Oil Company. Fuel oils and crude oils are brought from Sumatra, America and Mexico.

Much complaint was heard in England when the Grimsby steam trawlers, owned by syndicates, drove the small owner and the hardy fisherman from the seas, affecting the recruiting of the navy, as well as driving a hardy independent class into a condition of economical and political servitude. Japan has copied this unfortunate example, and steam trawlers have been introduced in her fishing waters. The government promises to control it before it seriously affects recruiting for the navy.

The Japanese have gone into shirt-making, the duty on raw material being rebated when the shirts are exported. Foreign designs are copied. The men receive nine dollars a month and the women six dollars. The hours are nine and one-half a day. The companies, like many of the Japanese industrials, grant a few holidays, and provide theatrical entertainments, moving-picture shows, baths and tea, none of which is costly, but seem to keep the workers from realizing that their wages should be three times what they are, even in Japan, for taxes amount to one-third of the income.

Winter clothing for the masses in general, and service clothing for the navy, army, artisans, etc., under modern conditions of hard wear, has become a stern problem in both Japan and China. Silk will not do. Cotton will not answer in this field. Wool has been adopted, and the gorgeous colors and texture of the Orient begin to vanish before the requirements of a practical age. Two of the largest woolen mills in Japan are the Mousseline (Boshuku) Weaving Company, at Osaka, and the Japan Woolen Company, at Kobe. Eighty per cent. of the total area of rocky Japan is not under cultivation, being ruined with tough bamboo grass, which seems impossible to eradicate, and which destroys the delicate mouths and throats of sheep. Japan has, therefore, to import her wool from Mongolia, Manchuria, England, France, Germany and Australia. Not having a full supply of yarn mills, she imports yarn also from England, France and Germany. Goat’s and camel’s hair is also imported from South America and Mongolia.

The movement for the conservation of timber has taken hold in Japan, reinforced cement poles, as well as creosoted poles, being used. The largest creosote works are at Osaka, and the preserved wood is now used for Japan’s famous light buildings, railroad trestling, ties, bridges, etc. Japan has an exceedingly rich treasure forest (one of the world’s last) east of the South Manchurian Railway, and also bordering the Fusan-Mukden line. Much of the hard wood of Japan and her colonies is being brought to America for furniture-making at present.

Japanese steamers will doubtless run to the east coast of America through the Panama Canal. Micki Shonzo talks of sending twenty of his vessels through. A Japanese line now carries nitrates, hides, salt, horses, beef, wool, fish, grain, etc., from Chile, and coal, rice, tea, silk, oils, bean cake, manufactures, matting, etc., to Chile. Japanese shipping in 1912 amounted to the enormous tonnage of 1,000,000, as compared with 170,000 tons on the day before the Chinese indemnity was paid to Japan in 1895.

Perhaps the rich dividends made by the Oriental Consolidated (gold) Mining Company, at Unsan, in the Yalu district of Korea, made Japan as anxious commercially as diplomatically to secure Korea. This American company, with which Leigh Hunt was connected, and whose concession was obtained through the offices of United States Minister Allen, has made in a concession 500 miles square 4,000 per cent. in ten years. One hundred thousand dollars was put into the gold mining plant, and $4,000,000 has been paid in dividends, the mines themselves, instead of added capital, paying for their own development. The Unsan plant is largely self-contained, having crushers, a foundry, machine shops, a fleet, a railway and lumbering plant, hospital and barracks. The mining costs only one dollar and forty cents per ton, hand labor, the Koreans being the best miners in the Far East, owing to their docile patience. Some of the mines are one thousand feet deep. The Korean Exploration Company (half American and half Japanese) has a gold mining concession at Chicksan, south of Seoul. The new terms that will probably be imposed on foreign mining by Japan will be at least twenty-five per cent. royalty on the net profits, machinery imported and ore exported to be duty and loti taxes remitted, respectively. If Japan can do the smelting, of course ores must go there for treatment.

In Formosa the three largest Japanese sugar companies are the Niitaka, the Taihoku and the Minami Seito (Southern Sugar Company), capitalized at about $2,000,000 gold each, with an output of 300,000 tons a year. Japan can increase this, and supply the world. The government grants subsidies to the cane growers for fertilizer, and money prizes for model plantations, the high tariff against Hongkong, of course, being a subsidy for the Formosan sugar mills, as far as supplying Japan is concerned.

Japan has opened an electric-driven cotton mill, the Naigai Wata, at Suchow Creek, Shanghai, sending to America for the boilers, to Germany for the dynamos, and to England (Oldham) for the spinning machinery. The owners and foremen are Japanese, the workers Chinese. Eighty-five per cent. of the material is local grown, and fifteen per cent. comes from India in Japanese steamers. The finished product, mainly yarns, is sent up the Yangtze River and along the coast in Japanese steamers, and is admitted into Japan preferentially as far as foreign products are concerned. The Japanese are extending their ownership of cotton mills erected in China, for the Mitsui Bussan Kaisha has bought the Hua Hsuan, the Shanghai and the San Tai mills at Shanghai, and the Wuchang Spinning Mill at Wuchang. The Mitsui Bishi Kaisha has bought the Chen Hua mill at Shanghai, and the Nippon Mill Company has bought the Jih Hsin mill in China. There is much food for thought in this situation. The Japanese also own one-third of the largest translating press in China, the Commercial Press of Shanghai.

The Japanese firm of Mitsui has established a refinery at Hankau to handle the famous nuts of Szechuen province, which produce the oil known as China wood oil. The Mitsui firm also handles the production of soy-bean oil in Manchuria, shipping the oil and the cake in great quantities in their own steamers to Europe and America. The Mitsuis do their own banking. The soy-oil is used for cooking, soap making, and as a substitute in paints for linseed oil, which is becoming scarce. The cake is used as a milk food and a fertilizer in Europe and America. To what proportions the industry has grown can be judged by the following figures: Newchwang (Chinese) shipped 230,000 tons of beans and 400,000 tons of bean cake in 1911. Dairen (Japanese) shipped 450,000 tons of beans and 300,000 tons of bean cake. Vladivostok (Russian) shipped 250,000 tons of each. The soy-bean oil amounted to about 700,000 hundredweight. This immense crop speaks eloquently of the richness of the black soil of the three provinces of vast Manchuria. The bean is also now being planted in Szechuen province in the rows where the nefarious poppy once bloomed, and America is using quantities of seed in the southern states in connection with enriching land which has been impoverished by cotton. The soy-bean, being nitrogenous, adds to, instead of taking from, the life of the soil. One ton of beans, besides two tons of soy hay, can be produced per acre.

Canadian and South African railways may own hotels, express, telegraph, telephone and land companies, but here is what the charter of the South Manchuria (Japan owned) Railway Company permits them to do: operate railways, cities, steamships, hotels, mines, electric light and gas plants, tramways, laboratories, laundries, shops, dormitories, go-downs (warehouses), hospitals, Y.M.C.A.’s, schools, libraries, mills, selling agencies, stockyards, forests, sawmills, farms, kaoliang distilleries, etc. This reminds one of the ancient East India Company’s powers before Warren Hastings was impeached, or of the ambition of Incoporator Dill in the palmy days of the incorporation laws of New Jersey State before the Interstate Commerce Commission got into its stride.

The pernicious influence of the yoshiwara and the demi-monde in Japan and the Japanese settlements and colonies throughout the Far East, is fully covered in the tenth chapter of Price Collier’s The West in the East. If the fire which destroyed the extensive, obtrusive yoshiwara quarter in the Susaki section of Tokio in 1911 had swept the whole institution away, womanhood throughout the world would not have the grievance against Japanese society which it now has. Neither China nor India ever sank this low in morals, despite all the talk about concubinage and slavery. The fault lies in the inherent weakness of religion in Japan. The Buddhism and Confucianism (Shintoism) which Japan imported, have degenerated and lost soul in the exotic state. If China needs Christianity, Japan needs it more. The Japanese women are delightfully vivacious; it is a pity so many should lose their self-respect. Possibly some of it substantiates the eternal teaching that no nation can persistently ignore poverty and not suffer in morals. The Japanese government is now doing something to remedy conditions and raise the moral tone. The fault lies largely with the people themselves; too great a love of money and too little a love of real religion, with the usual result that sacred womanhood is the first to be driven down at the wall.