Principles of western civilisation

xI TOWARDS THE FUTURE 445

the development of the world under the influence of Jaissez-faive competition has proceeded, the process has, however, shown no tendency to stop here. One of the last of the less developed peoples to be brought under the influence of Western conditions has been the Japanese. But as the Japanese have been slowly caught in the influence of an economic process continuing to fall throughout the world to the level of its ruling factor, they have in their turn now tended to enter the lists to compete with Indian capitalists for the same end of supplying China with cotton goods. Let us, therefore, having in view the tremendous struggle which Lancashire labour waged throughout the greater part of a century past to secure higher standards of life for its class, draw aside now fora moment the veil from the prevailing labour conditions in Japan, with which Lancashire tends thus to be confronted in the world-process, at the other end of a chain of sequences, all the links of which here disclose themselves to view under our eyes.

In an article published in the first year of the twentieth century an American writer gives a striking description of a characteristic scene of industrial Japan, the significance of which is only enhanced by the fact that the scene itself is described without any reference to the problem we are here discussing. “If I were asked,” says the writer in question,’ “to say, of all that I saw in Japan, what that is that lives most vividly in my memory, I should probably shock my artistic reader by saying that it was the loading of

1 The Right Rey. H. C. Potter, Bishop of New York.