After that came a long conglomeration of political questions, first tentative hints, designed to draw out his ideas, to determine his stand, but soon they launched into their pet topic, the miseries of the present situation in Japan.
"But surely you must see that, even if there are things to correct in other countries, in no place are conditions so terrible as they are in Japan." The elder professor had risen, swept out his hand, addressing not only Kent but the whole assembly, the students who sat gazing at him raptly. "There are only a few hundred thousands in the privileged class. They are the ones who are gaining everything. They took advantage of the fact that the people, the sixty millions, are still thinking as they did in the days of the Tokugawa, looking to their masters for orders, taking dumbly whatever they might deign to fling to them. They have been exploiting the people, and they and the militarists want to exploit the other people, too, in Siberia and China. You foreigners are always talking about the militarist rule of Japan; but you don't see that even the militarists are not all-powerful now. The real governing power of Japan is the little multi-millionaire class, the Watanabes, the Fukusakis, the Oharas, the Inouyes, the Yamanakas, the Katos, only about half a dozen enormously wealthy houses, with their mines, and their steamship companies, their tremendous business houses, their banks, who buy Diet members and cabinet ministers, who determine the Government's policy, who keep prices high by insisting on import tariffs, who wallow in concessions. Even the militarists bow to them. The plutocrats wanted Siberia, so we spent hundreds of millions of yen on the Siberia expedition and our young men were killed by the thousands that the plutocrats might get fisheries, and mines and oil wells. Japan to-day is a plutocratic oligarchy, with the militarists as a handy and subservient tool, with the police throwing into jail any one who tries to wake up the people to assert their rights. Just look about you. See, right here in Tokyo, the poor are huddled by thousands in hovels in Fukagawa and Honjo, where the river washes out their houses every year, and still they must pay heavy taxes on their miserable mud flats, while the rich with their parks, stretching over vast spaces in the best and highest parts of the city, pay taxes only on a valuation as forest lands or fields. These are the ones who want the people to remain as they were a hundred years ago, feudal slaves, in order that the rich may grow richer. That's why the police keep watch over us and the government officials hire _soshi_, professional ruffians, to break up our meetings. That's why it is a crime to 'harbor dangerous thoughts.' Property is the curse of all modern countries. When private property became known the class struggle began the world over; and nowhere is property as privileged as it is in Japan. Labor should be the measure of value, undifferentiated human labor, where all workers should be paid alike, no matter what might be the manner of their work. Here capital exploits labor, as capital always does, and only by abolition of capitalism can we abolish such exploitation."