regain her release, she must save up enough to repay this amount, in addition to making a certain sum for the proprietor of the particular house into which she has been sold. All this, of course, has to come out of her sordid earnings. When she has bought her freedom, she is allowed to return to her native town and get married.

The existence of such a town--with its brothels licensed by the municipal authority, which imposes a medical inspection on the girls twice a week--is a sufficient answer to the lying hypocrisy of the Japanese Governing Class.

But this is not all. There are in Japan about ten thousand factories and workshops, employing about seven hundred thousand girls and women, and three hundred thousand boy and men operatives. Ten per cent. of the female workers are under fourteen years of age. Many girls are employed all night, as well as during the day, in the cotton factories, their employers also insisting that they should work whilst eating. By way of punishment, many employers and foremen lash their girl operators, often stripping them for the purpose. They are also imprisoned in dark rooms, and required to work on reduced rations. Heavy "fines" are imposed, and, at the end of their contract terms, they often leave the factories penniless.

Similar barbarities characterise the treatment of the male workers, the treatment of the miners beggaring description.

Let the truth be told. Kotoku and his brave comrades were condemned to death because they dared to breathe a nobler moral atmosphere than Japanese Capitalism could tolerate. They dared to lighten the intellectual darkness of the proletariat. This was their crime. Let the world of the workers pay its tribute of humble respect to the memories of these dauntless comrades in revolt, these noble pioneers of freedom, these Christs, Brunos and Apostles of the coming Social Revolution, in far away Japan.