A FEATURE of the Japanese Labour Movement as compared with similar movements in other countries is the prominent part played in it by the agriculturist. It is as strong in the country as in the town. Roughly 10 per cent, of the adult male agricultural population is organized into peasants’ or tenants’ unions, a state of affairs which compares very favourably with the position in the industrial world, where the percentage of trade union membership is, according to the latest returns, only 7.5.

The explanation for this is to be found in the peculiar status of the Japanese peasant and the conditions under which he gains his living. It must first be pointed out that the landless labourer as he is known in England does not exist. The Japanese farmer is either an owner, or a tenant, or part owner part tenant, the figures being respectively 31 per cent., 28 per cent., and 41 per cent. This does not, however, mean that he is any better off than the farm labourer. The total arable area is fifteen million acres, which are split up among five and a half million families (33,000,000 people). The average family holding is a bare 2 1/2 acres; 35 per cent, farm under 1 1/4 acres, 70 per cent, under 3, only 10 per cent, over 5, and in all Japan there are less than five thousand proprietors with over 125 acres.

It is obvious that with such small holdings as these figures indicate it is as much as the Japanese peasant can do to extract a living from the soil.

It is a misfortune for those writers who base their character sketches on historic fact that they are tempted so often on to ground where it is necessary for the success of their artistic effort that they should form some conception of the reactions and background of the Catholic mind. In the recent past no difficulty was experienced in England in this matter. That reasoned and subdued religious temper which was the legacy of the matured Anglican tradition provided a secure fortress for the spirit from which the ecclesiastical archaeologist could sally forth on those delectable voyages of Victorian discovery. It was a time, too, in which historical episode had to bend itself to the slow movement of the lych gate and attune itself to the dust-laden sunshine of a rector’s study, to the ink wells and the long quill pens, to the Bible and the calf-bound books of sermons, and sometimes to those early, temerarious volumes of an Anglo-Catholic theology, before it could hope to reach the light of print. The broad lines of political history might be seized by some Whig historian, fashionable and remote, but how completely and with what slow content did this clerical atmosphere pervade the Tory camp. But it was never a purpose of the influential Whigs to concern themselves with monks and the old Church life and the Elizabethan priesthood, and it was in the vicarage gardens of the English country that such trees of knowledge grew.

His Holiness Pope Pius XI, proclaiming Albertus Magnus a Saint and a Doctor of the Church, said of him, that he knew everything that was to be known. And indeed his outstanding characteristic was the universality of his learning. In his writings he covered the whole field of knowledge, and he was as great in philosophy and theology as in meteorology, astronomy, geography, mineralogy, chemistry, physics, zoology, botany, physiology, and in the other natural sciences. It is, therefore, not surprising that on account of the eminence and universality of his learning he was known among his contemporaries, as he has been known ever since, as the Doctor Universalis, and as Magnus, ‘ the Great.’

His complete works were printed for the first time in 1651 at Lyons, in twenty-one volumes in folio, and again at Paris in 1890-98, in thirty-eight volumes in quarto. Besides these, many authentic writings are still in manuscript in the libraries and archives of various cities of Europe. Scholars consider that, if published, they would fill at least ten folio volumes.

But it is impossible to appreciate the imposing personality of the Doctor Universalis without having a thorough knowledge of his writings, and that is an exceedingly difficult task without a sure guidance, as all those who are acquainted with mediaeval studies well know. At the moment this difficulty is the greater owing to the lack of a critical edition of his works, and to the fact that some of those published are either dubious or clearly spurious.

At four o’clock on a June morning of the year 1624 the sister and niece of Master Isaak Fettiplace, Parson of Kintonbury Parva in the County of Dorset, came down to put the Parson’s study to rights while the Parson was still a-bed. The elder woman opened the casement and a warm mist lapped in from the sea, whose purling waves, visible at the base of eroded chalk-cliffs, foretold a tropical day. Her daughter, with a bundle of kindling in her apron, approached the hearth. Contrary to his custom, the Parson had demanded a fire on his return from London the night before, and had sat up late by it. The women, wakeful and a trifle anxious, had heard him move up to his bed-chamber hours after midnight. Now the embers must be swept up and the pyre between the heavy steel dogs re-laid.

‘He hath burnt his journal!’ —the cry came from the niece, on her knees before the hearth.

‘He hath burnt his journal?’ —it was the incredulous riposte of the mother, wheeled round to face the scene of catastrophe.

Flake upon flake of burnt paper, steel-grey like the ‘debris of a wasps’-nest, mingled with, where they did not cover, the brands of the extinct fire. A binding of pig-skin, wrenched off before the rest of the folio met its fate, lay under the Parson’s table.

I was staying a few days in a Missionary College, where two hundred boys, of all ages and types, are doing their schooling, so that when they go forth to teach all nations they shall not be found wanting. I had said the Community Mass, and was making my thanksgiving. Two little boys—my servers—were putting out the candles, they were solemn-eyed, radiant, and the red of their cheeks outshone the crimson of their soutanes. I was distracted: insistently those children associated themselves with something. Remotely, subconsciously, an analogy was forming. But for the time I got no further. In the evening I remembered. I had been walking, and when I returned the college was wrapped in a toga of mist, the hills were frosted, the world white and grey, transfigured by the moon. A year back—almost to the very day— rattling through a land of frozen forest and morass, I had been sitting for twelve hours in a railway carriage. Opposite me were two young Bolsheviks. It was they (I realised with a shock) in their crimson exuberance that co-ordinated and completed my analogy.

They, too, were missionaries, those Bolsheviks. They even hoped to convert me. They, too, were ardent, sincere and well instructed. But the gospel they preached was not of the Saviour of mankind. Their gospel was the story of despair, man made, man tricked, man rebellious, self-assertive against he knows not what. (For here is a generation that cannot admit the God its heart is seeking, and secretly has always loved.)