"The Industrial Welfare Committee seeks to Christianize the industrial classes, and to encourage the development of dealing upon Christian principles with the complicated questions growing out of the relations of capital and labor. By the industrial classes we mean the non-capitalistic laborers and bread-winners. It includes men, women, and many thousands of children. They do not own the machinery they handle, and have no voice in the control of the industries with which they are connected. Being without any say in the control of factories, machines, and raw material, they can be discharged at any moment by employers for reasons satisfactory alone to themselves. Their bodies, their minds, and oftentime their morals, become subservient to foremen and managers. The unskilled laborers in particular have no margin of either wages or time for wholesome recreations, for accidents, old age, widowhood, and unemployment. Besides these there is another large class in Japan, of small traders who rent their shops and eke out earnings by the sweating process, or by renting rooms for doubtful purposes. To these are to be added fishermen who do not own tackle, tenant farmers and their employees, and the main body of school-teachers; also an army engaged in transportation, together with postal clerks, postmen, and others. Incidental to this are the districts of large cities and mining camps, where there are congested populations of unskilled laborers subjected to diseases occasioned by bad drainage, inadequate housing, and all the consequent evils. As these do not earn sufficient wages to entitle them to vote, they have no voice whatever in the betterment of their surroundings.... "There is a growing tendency toward the fixedness of a gulf between laborers and their employers, so much so that Japan's great danger in this direction is that she may fail to realize that she has a labor problem on hand, and one that can be solved here, as elsewhere, only on the basis of Christian principles of common fair dealing." In spite, however, of abundant evidence that Christian ethical and philanthropic ideals are receiving wide acceptance in Japan, far wider than would be suggested by the statistics of membership in the Christian churches, it is also true that the evils of Occidental industrialism and materialism are sweeping in like a flood. Turning now from general statements as to the ethico-industrial conditions of the working women of Japan, in the next chapter I give the story of a single institution. CHAPTER XIII THE MATSUYAMA WORKING GIRLS' HOME