We are to understand, then, that a large portion of these 3,000,000 unmarried Japanese women and girls are engaged more or less continuously in some sort of industrial work, either in their own homes or in small groups in their immediate vicinity. The introduction into Japan of Occidental mechanical civilization, with its great machinery run by steam power, and the great factory system, taking girls and young women away from their home industries, home restraints, and home training, is producing mighty changes in Japan's traditional civilization. The real consequences of these new modes of life and labor are still little appreciated. There is taking place a rapid readjustment of population, which indeed is easily seen, but the disastrous results to the mental, moral, and religious life of the people, even to the maintenance of the ideals and standards that controlled the older arts and industries, are yet little realized, for the great changes have only begun within the past two decades. A generation or two must pass before we can see clearly what it all really means. Meanwhile it is for those who foresee coming evils to sound aloud the call, and, as prophets, to do that which in them lies to meet the threatened disasters, and turn new conditions into blessings. Japan has the advantage of a century of European experience from which to learn wisdom. It is to be hoped that she will avoid many of the perils and evils into which the West has fallen, but the signs of the times are not altogether reassuring. There are, as we shall see later on, ominous clouds on Japan's industrial horizon. CHAPTER IV SILK WORKERS The chief wealth-earning domestic industry carried on by farmers' wives and daughters is the rearing of silkworms and the reeling, spinning, and weaving of the silk. Japan supplies about 28 per cent. of the total silk of the world and 60 per cent. of that used in the United States. The value of the silk exported in 1913 was $63,000,000. Women are the chief workers, contributing 90 per cent. of the labor. Here again the toil is taxing beyond belief.