Principles of western civilisation

446 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

a steamship at Nagasaki with coal. The huge vessel, the Empress of Japan, was one morning, soon after its arrival at Nagasaki, suddenly festooned—I can use no other word—from stem to stern on each side with a series of hanging platforms, the broadest nearest the base and diminishing as they rose, strung together by ropes, and ascending from the sampans, or huge boats in which the coal had been brought alongside the steamer, until the highest and narrowest platform was just below the particular port-hole through which it was received into the ship. There were, in each case, all along the sides of the ship some four or five of these platforms, one above another, on each of which stood a young girl. On board the sampans men were busy filling a long line of baskets holding, I should think, each about two buckets of coal, and these were passed up from the sampans in a continuous and unbroken line until they reached their destination, each young girl, as she stood on her particular platform, passing, or rather almost throwing, these huge basketfuls of coals to the girl above her, and she again to her mate above her, and so on to the end. The rapidity, skill, and, above all, the rhythmic precision with which, for hours, this really tremendous task was performed, was an achievement which might well fill an American athlete with envy and dismay. . . . And at this task these girls continued, uninterruptedly and blithely, from ten o'clock in the morning until four o’clock in the afternoon, putting on board in that time, I was told, more than one thousand tons of coal. I am quite free to say that I do not believe that there is another body of workfolk in the world who could have per-