ing tree in the cold winter wind. We envied those crows on the clean limbs of that tree and pitied these human beings in their poverty, cold, hunger, filth and squalor. They were made for better things. They were meant to live.

From these homes we proceeded to the neighboring little industrial hospital where the work is carried on in an old house by a kind-hearted medical doctor. It is the only strictly industrial hospital that we have found in China. On the first cot is a boy of seven years of age who has lost two fingers in an unprotected machine in the cotton mill. He was working with his two little sisters. The three of them combined were earning about eleven cents a day. He will receive no damages from the company for this accident. On the second cot lies a little girl of twelve who has lost a portion of her hand in an unguarded machine. Her face expressed a strangely quiet content for she is having the first complete rest and probably the first sufficient food that she has ever known in her life of toil.

In the next room of the hospital is a little girl of thirteen with the flesh torn from her arm which will disable her for life. Here also is a man whose arm had been torn off. He had fallen in a fit of apoplexy into the machinery. Fortunately the machine was not injured! He was formerly earning sixteen cents a day but now that he is unprofitable he has been discharged and there is nothing left for him to do but to beg or starve. And so it goes down the wards of this hospital which is treating some ten thousand patients a year from the mills. Most of the factories are paying ten cents a day for board and treatment in this hospital. In some of the Chinese mills the managers refuse to send accident cases to the hospital to avoid paying this paltry amount. Ordinarily no damages are paid for accident, maiming or death. In one mine recently, however, where a number of men were killed by an explosion, the

company allowed twenty dollars for each man's life. The mules lost were valued at fifty dollars a head, but humanity is still the cheapest commodity in China.

Working such long hours for such wages it will be seen in what a favorable position this places the employers of China. Thus we read in the Maritime Customs Report for 1920 concerning a certain Cotton Spinning Factory which paid over 100 per cent a year following the war, "The profits of the factory again surpassed $500,000.. For the past two years it has been running day and night, with scarcely any intermission. The number of hands employed is 2,500, and the following is the wage table per day:1

"It will be seen that the company is in an exceptionally favorable position. With the raw material at their doors, an abundant and absurdly cheap labor supply to draw on, and no vexatious factory laws to observe, it is not surprising that their annual profits should have exceeded their total capital on at least three occasions." Truly the company is in an exceptionally "favorable position" making over a hundred per cent profit a year after the war while paying children of ten from 32 to 5 cents a day, and a maximum of 30 cents for skilled men and foremen.

Space forbids a description of the factories in Canton and South China where conditions were similar to those in

1 Quoted by Bishop McConnell. All figures are given in gold, not Mexican.

the North. In Canton we were invited to meet with the leaders of eighty labor unions who had formed a Federation of Labor. As we met these men we were impressed by the seriousness of the situation and the desperate industrial conditions for which some remedy must be found.

It is no wonder that under such inhuman conditions there is a growing unrest on the part of labor. This has been caused by the world-wide awakening after the war, the example of Russia, the agitation of the professors and students of the Renaissance Movement, the articles in the press and the spontaneous uprising of long oppressed masses of Chinese labor. The movement began in North China with the student strike in Peking over the Shantung question, and in the South in Canton in 1920. During 1921 there was a successful strike in almost every industry in Canton. The celebrated Seamen's strike in Hong Kong in January, 1922, stimulated a labor movement all over China. The president of the Seamen's Union complaining of the discrimination against Chinese seamen stated their case as follows: "The Chinese have taken a stand against deprivation of their rights, rough treatment, 14 hours' work a day, and an existence bordering on semi-starvation." After presenting three petitions without any satisfactory answer, 1,500 seamen struck on January 13, 1922. By January 27 the number of strikers had reached 30,000. When the British Government of Hong Kong proclaimed the Seamen's Union an unlawful society, a sympathetic strike of coolies, domestic servants and other laborers increased the number to some 50,000.

Within a month 166 steamers were held up with a loss of two and a half million dollars. Workers in other parts of China stood by the strikers. The strike lasted nearly three months from January 13 till March 5 and resulted in the almost complete paralysis of the industrial life of

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Hong Kong. On March 6 the combined forces of the government and capital capitulated, the order was rescinded which had declared the Seamen's Union unlawful, and a gigantic parade replaced the signboard of the union which had been raided by the police. This was the electric spark which flashed a current of hope through China's new world of labor. March 6, 1922, will mark a milestone in the industrial history of China like the celebrated Dockers' Strike in England which organized successfully the unskilled workers in 1889.

The signal victory of the seamen in Hong Kong spread like a contagion among the workers of China, prepared by the solidarity of the family clan and guild to act together. The movement extended northward along the coast, up the rivers and along the railways to the miners in the far north.

During the latter half of 1922, sixty labor organizations were formed in Shanghai alone and fifty strikes occurred. Unfortunately the "industrial labor spy" described by Professor Richard Cabot of Harvard has crept into the situation in China, as in Japan. Of sixty-eight of the larger strikes recently conducted only four failed, six were undecided and fifty-eight were successful. It was as inevitable as it was desirable that Chinese labor should organize to improve its conditions.

The modern trade union and employers' associations in China are developments growing out of the common soil of the ancient guild which united both employer and employee in one movement, like the ancient guilds of England. These Chinese guilds date back at least a thousand and in some cases possibly two thousand years. They were formed to stabilize business, to secure justice, settle disputes and enforce their own law upon competing employers or recalcitrant employees in these local self-governing democracies.

The power of the guild was so great that its extreme penalties, like those of the all-powerful caste system of India, might mean social ostracism or economic death. Membership was practically compulsory.

The guild standardized and stabilized wages and conditions. The employer seldom tried to lower or the workmen to raise the fixed standard. All the members of a trade or craft belonged to the guild in a city or province, with a membership ranging from 100 to as high as 600,000 members, as in the Chihli cotton weavers guild, where they are now fighting for their very life in competition with the modern factory system.1

The invasion of modern industry has created two groups with conflicting and diverging interests in the trade union and the employers' association developing out of the common root of the guild. In the wealthier trades of the north the guilds have tended to become employers associations. In the south we found the workers trade unions still often called guilds, half evolved from the old system. All the evils of modern competitive capitalism are now invading China. The Chinese genius for disciplined solidarity in the joint family, the clan and the guild enables them to get together quickly and act effectively in union. Both employers and workers are somewhat timid and ready for compromise. A small and determined group have the power of intimidation so that labor leaders can coerce the men.

The first National Labor Conference in China met in Canton May 1-6, 1922, where 160 delegates from 12 cities

1 See Peking, a Social Survey, by 8. D. Gamble, pp. 163-222, and "The Guilds of China," by H. B. Morse, who says: "The Chinese trade guilds establish rules and compel obedience to them; they fix prices and enforce adhesion; they settle or modify trade customs and obtain instant acquiescence; they impose their will on traders in and out of the guilds, and may even, through the measure known as the 'cessation of all business,' cause the government to modify or withdraw its orders."