| 1899 | 1908 | |
| Farm laborer, male | $0.13 | $0.19 |
| Farm laborer, female | .08-1/2 | .11-1/2 |
| Gardener | .24 | .34 |
| Weaver, male | .15 | .22 |
| Weaver, female | .09 | .12 |
| Shoemaker | .22-1/2 | .32-1/2 |
| Carpenter | .25 | .40 |
| Blacksmith | .23 | .34 |
| Day laborer | .17 | .26-1/2 |
When I asked Director Matsui what he paid the hands I saw at work on the Agricultural College farm, he answered, "Well, being so near Tokyo, we have to pay 30 to 40 sen (15 to 20 cents) a day, but in the country, generally, I should say 20 to 35 sen" (10 to 13-1/2 cents a day).
{175}
Moreover, there is a savage struggle for employment even at these low figures; men work longer hours than in America, and their tasks are often heart-sickening in their heaviness: tasks such as an American laborer would regard as inhuman.
Take, for example, the poor fellow who pulls the jinrikisha. He is doing the work that horses and mules do at home, and for wages such as our Southern negroes would refuse for ordinary labor. More than this, in most cases he is selling you not only his time but his life-blood. Run he must with his human burden, and faster than Americans would care to run without a burden; and the constant strain overtaxes his heart and shortens his days. More than this, he must go in all kinds of weather, and having become thoroughly heated, must shiver in the winter wind or driving rain during waits. The exposure and the overtaxing of the heart are alike ruinous. The rickshaw man's life, I was told in Japan, is several years shorter than that of the average man.
And yet so many men are driven by the general poverty into the rickshaw business that I have hardly found a city in which it is not overcrowded. In Peking on one occasion I almost thought my life endangered by the mob who jostled, tugged, and fought for the privilege of earning the 15 or 20 cents fare my patronage involved. In Hong Kong two runners, wild-eyed with the keenness of the savage struggle for existence, menaced the smaller, younger man I had hired as if they would take me by force from his vehicle to their own--and this for a climb so steep that I soon got out and walked rather than feel myself guilty of "man's inhumanity to man" by making a fellow being pull me. Fiercer yet was the competition in Hankow, where not even the brutal clubbing of the policeman was enough to keep the men in order. In wintry Newchwang I think I suffered almost as much as my rickshaw man did merely to see him wading through mud and foulness such as I should not wish my horse to go through at home--though if he had {176} not waded I should have had to, and he was the more used to it!
I mention the hard life of the Oriental laborer who pulls the jinrikisha because it is typical. The business would not be crowded if it were not that the men find life in other lines no better. Consider the men who carried me in my sedan chair in Canton. As each man fitted the wooden shafts over his shoulders I could see that they were welted with corns like a mule's shoulders chafed by the hames through many a summer's plowing.
Consider, too, the thousands of Chinese and Japanese who do the work not of carriage horses, but of draft horses. From the time you land in Yokahoma your heart is made sick by the sight of half-naked human-beings harnessed like oxen to heavily laden carts and drays. Bent, tense, and perspiring like slaves at the oar, they draw their heavy burdens through the streets. One or two men wearily pull an immense telegraph pole balanced on a two-wheeled truck. Eight or ten men are harnessed together dragging some merchant's heavy freight. Four to a dozen other men carry some heavy building-stone or piece of machinery by running bamboo supports from the shoulders of the men behind to the shoulders of the men in front: you can see the constant, tortuous play of the muscles around each man's rigid backbone while the strained, monotonous, half-weird chorus, "Hy-ah! Hullah! Hee-ah! Hey!" measures their tread and shifts the strain from man to man, step by step, with the precision of clock work. On the rivers in China, too, one sees boats run by human treadmill power: a harder task than that of Sisyphus is that of the men who sweat all day long at the wheel, forever climbing and never advancing.
Nor do the women and children of the Orient escape burdens such as only men's strong shoulders should bear. Children who should have the freedom that even the young colt gets--how my heart has gone out to them cheated out of the joys {177} of childhood! And the women with children strapped on their backs while they steer boats and handle passengers and traffic about Hong Kong! Or leave, if you will, the water-front at Hong Kong and make the hard climb up the steep, bluff-like, 1800-foot mountainside, dotted with the handsome residences of wealthy Englishmen: you can hardly believe that every massive timber, every ton of brick, every great foundation-stone was carried up, up from the town below, by the tug and strain of human muscle--and not merely human muscle, but in most cases the muscles of women! Probably no governor in any state in America lives in a residence so splendid as that of the governor-general of Hong Kong--certainly no governor's residence is so beautifully situated, halfway up a sheer mountain-slope--and yet the wife of the governor-general told me that the material used in the building was brought up the mountainside by women!
Hardly better fare the women in the factories. I mentioned in a former letter the mills in Shanghai where women work 13-1/4 hours for 12 cents a day; and in most cases the women in Eastern factories are herded together in crowded compounds little better than the workhouses for American criminals!