The good health of the girls in our Home has been in strong contrast with the health of those in other boarding-houses, even in the best dormitories of the best factories in other cities. Statistics recently compiled by the government show that the average death-rate among factory operatives throughout the country is extraordinarily high. The highest, fifty per cent. on account of an epidemic, was reported from a certain factory owned and managed boarding-house in Niigata prefecture. Not one girl has ever died in our Home. Of the 301 girls who had lived in our Home by 1911, only eight, all told, died. In 1912 the Home passed through a crisis that threatened to destroy it. Late in 1911 the one factory in Matsuyama, where all the girls worked, was sold out to parties living in Osaka. A new manager was sent down who introduced many drastic changes. The change most affecting us was the stopping of the night work and the lengthening of day work to fourteen hours: namely, from 6 A.M. till 8 P.M. The girls in the Home soon became dissatisfied, and not many months passed before all had left the factory. Mr. Omoto was urged by the manager to find and bring in new girls. He refused however on the ground that he could not ask anybody to work such brutally long hours. Had it not been for a little weaving department with which we had already been experimenting, the Home would have been compelled to close. More looms were secured and those girls who wished to remain with us were given opportunity for work. Mr. Omoto's attention was at that time directed to the condition of the weaving girls in the scores and even hundreds of little establishments in the city and its suburbs. He soon found that an educational, economic, moral, and religious condition existed among them not unlike that which he had found among the factory girls of Matsuyama a dozen years before. The weaving establishments are, as a rule, small private affairs, usually having less than ten girls each, and are therefore wholly outside of the supervision of the government. The treatment of workers and the hours of labor are entirely settled by the individual owners. As a rule the girls are apprenticed for from two to three years immediately on leaving the primary school, at an age therefore of twelve or thirteen. They barely earn their living, although they work from daybreak to ten or eleven at night, and in some establishments even till midnight--from fifteen to eighteen hours a day! There are no night shifts and rare holidays on occasional festivals. The hygienic and moral conditions are about as bad as can be. It is estimated that one half of the girls are ruined before the close of their apprenticeship. Our Home is now deliberately attacking the new problem, which in many respects is more difficult than was the old one. We have put up two small buildings on our own grounds, enabling us to have thirty looms to give opportunity for work to thirty girls.