Untitled

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LII, Issue LIII, 3 February 1908, Page 6

FISCAL EXACTIONS.

■ been compelled to submit to heavier taxation, and so small is the margin of his' net learnings that the, average 1 proletarian is continually on -tf&e verge o? bankruptcy, and the loss of a week's work would inevitably wreck bis financial, position. His accounts of revenue and expenditure are so finely balanced that he has no surplus to set against the possibility of adversity. Once down and he, is' trodden under foot in the struggle for existence. There is no sympathy; for failures, and in this respect Japan iB-not singular, though in the £and of the Rising Sun the metaphor is absolutely unequivpcal. But there zd more than the element of pride in the country. Poverty is not paraded ; on the contrary,- it 'is concealed by the municipal authorities, as far as possible. > It is not necessary, "*• however,' to read between the lines. The .chief ( assets of Japan are a soil naturally unproductive ' and a atrea^th of purpose which extorts from that same soil the .utmost- yields. The strentZQttp fight for existence makes a brave jshpw,, but it cannot conceal the open apres with which the cities' qf Tojhjoi Nikko, Nagoya, and Kyoto are infested. Thousands of their inhabitants are literally starving,; there is no'wpjrk for them even at the low market ra^es of labor, and it is quite an uncommon sensation to many of them to know what a sufficiency of food really, ntea^s. < There is dread poverty in other parts of .the world. Even in the opulent Austrian capitals scavengers make a round of cafes after dosing time to pick, $he cigar ends from the gutters to earn a precarious livelihood; in NaplejsC,the rubbish heaps are rummag«d over and over again in the hope that something marketable may be discovered; but in Japan thousands actually feed upon the garbage thrown out into the streets, and it may be , imagined that, in a. country where housewives are remarkable^ for their frugal- ' ity, such scraps of comfort are scarcely of an appetising nature. The water channels tire Sedulously » searched by poverty-s^tjeken hordes,, to whom a -penny is ja competence and twopence, a fortune. > - .