It became almost impossible to segregate fact from fiction. One could not know what might have happened. It was impracticable to depend on the reports of the press; one knew that the most important news was not allowed to see the light of day. Kent tried to get what he could from original sources. What was capital thinking of all this; what was it doing about it? He sought bankers and industrial leaders. They all professed that there was no cause for great worry, brought forth sheafs of statistics compiled by various government offices and capital-labor harmony societies, trying to console themselves with patently absurd figures proving that there was no unemployment, that more men were given work than lost employment, that all was serene. Ostrich-like they buried their heads in the convenient mess of figures, insistent on not seeing the truth.
"It's only a phase of the depression which we are passing through just like other countries," they insisted. "Things are no worse here than they were in America and Europe a few decades ago when your workmen were in a similar condition. Remember, we have in a few years almost caught up industrially with the countries which were several centuries ahead of us. Give us a few years more and conditions here will be the same. Anyway, the situation here is not as bad as in the United States and England, for example. Our strikes are insignificant in comparison. We have never had business held up for weeks and months by nation-wide strikes. In New York and Chicago you have daylight bank robberies and hold-ups. In Japan a man may walk safely anywhere with a roll of bank notes in his hand, even in the poorest quarters. And the industrial workers are too few in proportion to the total of population to count for much; only they make lots of noise. The bulk of the people is agricultural. There's nothing very much to worry about."
He pointed out that danger lay in the fact that the agricultural population also had become infected with resentment against capital. Thousands of unions of tenant farmers, who constitute half of the agriculturists, had been formed and clamored against the exactions of rapacious landlords. Some of them had made united demands for rent reduction, had refused to till the soil when such were not granted, and had proclaimed that if other tenants were brought in to cultivate the land, these men would be ostracized; so the fields now lay idle. What about the formation of the gigantic federation of farmers' unions and its great convention in Kobe? What about the report that soldiers who had served their term in the army in Siberia were sowing the seeds of Bolshevism throughout the peasantry? Did not that show that the farmers were likely to make common cause with the industrial workers?
