He called on Ikeda, the head of the federation of labor, a rotund, pleasant-faced man with humorous eyes beaming from behind great round spectacles. "Yes, it is getting worse all the time," said the leader. "Of course, all this helps to bring the unions together, but it is difficult to keep them in hand. We all want abolition of capitalism, but while some of us want it accomplished peacefully, by evolution, many of the workers, most of the smaller unions especially, want nothing short of revolution. They are Sovietists, Communists, Syndicalists, Anarchists, all kinds. They are getting more and more out of hand."
"Would universal suffrage content them any?" asked Kent. "I should think if you centered on the suffrage movement, gave them that to think about, you might maintain control. Anyway, it seems to me that labor must remain powerless as long as it is voiceless and has no control in the government. I take it that you people will back up the universal suffrage agitation at the next session of the Diet?"
The eyes behind the great lenses became serious. "No, we're going to leave it alone. In fact, we dare not take it up. The workmen look upon that as futile, a mere sop, a process that's altogether too slow to suit them. We're afraid that if we took up suffrage as an organized movement, the unions would get out of hand; it would set them thinking of more revolutionary measures; they would insist on them and would sweep aside us who are trying to lead them along a constructive line of action. Anyway, the masses are hardly ripe for suffrage yet. They must be educated first; that's what we are trying to do now, to educate them."
So here, too, was temporizing. Labor leaders, like capitalist leaders, were trying to play for time, to avoid facing the music, while the steam in the kettle kept becoming denser and stronger, with ever more insistent force striving against the walls of repression. But how much was there really behind all this clamor of labor? He came to wonder to what extent these complaints were justified. It was true, what the capitalists said, that conditions in Japan were no worse, or not much worse, than they had been in America and Europe not so many decades ago. Of course, the unrest was due to the fact that workers and farmers, heretofore satisfied with feudal conditions not knowing that they could be otherwise, had suddenly been shown by the Socialists, the soldiers coming back from Siberia, the radical press, that workmen in other countries lived in what seemed to frugal Japanese eyes the luxury of millionaires, and now they wanted similar privileges, yes, rights. But capital was right in its contention that workers who could individually bring forth only one-fifth the result produced by the white workmen could be paid wages only in proportion to their output capacity--otherwise Japanese production cost would rise to the point where Japanese goods would be helpless in world competition and industry must cease. The point seemed to be whether capital was holding down labor to unduly harsh conditions.