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Rh would be punished for it. I was deeply moved by this.

“When in the New Year vacation I was stopped by mother from leaving school, I thought out a plan of my own. Were I to enter university, I would try to find work to do in my spare time. If I succeeded, even if I got mother to leave the mill, we would have enough for the two of us. But as things turned out, this too has ended in nothing.

“Sitting before this urn, my thoughts turn to the system which silently, with subtle force, destroyed my mother’s life.

“The cocoons getting thinner, the reels fatter—the dead black body of the grub.

“My mother wanted me to get on in the world. That was her only wish. I, too, tried to comply with it and exerted all my energies towards that goal—and see what’s happened.

“But I will not despair. In the crematorium in the hills, just as I was getting together her ashes by the light of a candle, suddenly an idea came to me. It seemed a new road opened up before me. There was not only one cocoon. My mother was not the only sufferer.

“In this land of ours alone, how many millions, no, tens of millions of human beings, like the cocoons in the boiling water, are having their life­ blood sucked away from them?

“It may sound funny to you to say it abruptly like this. But I know the enemy I have to fight. I expect I shall have a chance of talking this out with you more in detail some time. I remember how once in our middle school days I used my