Among the many classes of working women named on a previous page are the "clerks." This is a new feature of Japanese life worthy of note, although the class is still small. Under this name we include ticket sellers in railway stations, assistant barbers, and saleswomen and shopgirls. Members of this class have of course enjoyed a relatively large amount of education, and are therefore above the average in general intelligence and ability. These girls are recruited from the families of city artizans and merchants. The descendants of palanquin bearers, day laborers, eta, and hi-nin form to-day the lowest stratum of society, dwelling on the outskirts of large cities, in wretchedness, filth, and poverty, getting their living from day to day and breeding criminals, geisha, and prostitutes. The stone-breakers, gravel gatherers, coolies, and most irregular of city day laborers come from this class. Many of these men have illustrious pedigrees. Some fell to this estate through wanton lust and reckless expenditure of inherited wealth; some are descendants of disinherited sons; the ancestors of some have met political reverses and found refuge and safety only among the "non-humans," where they could live unrecognized and unknown. Thus all grades of blood course through the veins of this, the lowest class in Japan. The wives and daughters of these men share their fate and fortune, living from hand to mouth. Their life is so low and uncertain that it is absurd to speak of secondary occupations--they lack even a primary occupation; and their homes, which constitute the slums of the cities, are no places in which to carry on any domestic industry. With the coming to Japan however of modern industrialism and the building of large factories in or near the cities, the wives and daughters of this class have opportunity for regular work, earning enough and more than enough to support themselves while actually at work. But when attacked by laziness, fickleness, or disease, they easily slump back into the same economic pit. From this lowest class comes one of the serious dangers threatening the better life of modern Japan. The insufficiency of these laborers, their unreliable character, and the inferior quality of their work, have forced the factories to search elsewhere for hands. These they have found in the relatively workless, but industrious and comparatively moral farming class. These farmers' girls have been brought to the cities and thrown into intimate relations with the lowest, most dissolute, despised, and really despicable classes, and the results have naturally been disastrous in many ways, as we shall see in a later chapter. CHAPTER VI _KOMORI_ (BABY-TENDERS)