r match-making of this sort is an important industry here, as well as the sort conducted through matrimonial middlemen without waiting for the aid or consent of either of the parties involved). I have never in my life seen such a box of matches in America. Not in a hundred boxes at home would you find so many splinters without heads, so many defective matches. And in turning out the boxes themselves, I am told that it takes five or six hands to equal the product of one skilled foreign laborer. "It takes two or three Japanese servants to do the work of one white servant" is the general verdict of housekeepers, while it has also been brought to my {40} attention that in shops two or three clerks are required to do the work of one at home. A Japanese newspaper man (his paper is printed in English) tells me that linotype compositors set only half as many ems per hour as in America. In short, the general verdict as I have found it is indicated by what I have written, and the most enthusiastic advocate of Japanese cheap labor, the captain of the steamer on which I came from America, rather spoiled his enthusiasm for getting his ship coaled at Nagasaki for 7-1/2 cents a ton, by acknowledging that if it rained he should have to keep his ship waiting a day to get sufficient hands.

Moreover, while the Japanese factory workers are forced into longer hours than labor anywhere else--eleven hours at night this week, eleven hours in the day next week--I am convinced that the people as a whole are more than ordinarily averse to steady, hard, uninterrupted toil. "We have a streak of the Malay in us," as a Japanese professor said to me, "and we like to idle now and then. The truth is our people are not workers; they are artists, and artists must not be hurried." Certainly in the hurried production of the factory the Japanese artistic taste seems to break down almost beyond redemption, and the people seem unable to carry their habits of neatness