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 A s 
 
 THE 
 
 NATURAL HISTORY 
 
 OF THK 
 
 CHINESE BOY 
 
 AND OF THE 
 
 CHINESE HIRE: 
 
 A STUDY IN SOCIOLOGY. 
 
 BY THE AUTHOR OF 
 
 “CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS.” 
 
 

 -y. 
 
 
 
 
 
 A 
 
 

 THE 
 
 NATURAL HISTORY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 CHINESE BOY 
 
 AND OF THE 
 
 CHINESE GIRL: 
 
 A STUDY IN SOCIOLOGY. 
 
 BY THE AUTHOR OF 
 
 CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS.” 
 
 
SHANGHAI : 
 
 PRINTKH AT THE “NORTH-CHINA HERALD” 
 
 OFFICE. 
 
 1890 . 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 If the proper, study of mankind is man, 
 the subject of the following pages must be 
 of interest to every one who enquires into 
 the forces which have moulded Chinese 
 society in the past, and which regulate it 
 at present. The observations upon which 
 the conclusions are based have been largely, 
 although not exclusively, taken in the 
 northern part of the empire. The Chinese 
 people, however, are in such an import- 
 ant sense a unit, that dill'erences in cus- 
 tom resemble those local variations of the 
 compass, which, once understood and al- 
 lowed for, serve but to confirm what they 
 at first appear to contradict. 
 
 That all readers will agree with the con- 
 clusions reached, is not to be expected, 
 but if conducted in a spirit of candour 
 the consideration of the question as to what 
 causes the present condition of Chinese 
 society is due, cannot fail to be beneficial, 
 whatever theories may ultimately be either 
 established or overthrown. 
 
 The conviction constantly grows upon 
 those who have most opportunity to know 
 them, that the Chinese are physically and 
 intellectually among the foremost races of 
 the earth. Their moral nature has, however, 
 received but a one-sided development. They 
 have had in large measure that ‘ ‘ good” which 
 has been pronounced to be the worst enemy 
 of the “ best.” Many of the results which 
 have been attained are of a high order of 
 excellence, but these good results are 
 
 uniformly accompanied by others to which 
 it is our present object to direct attention. 
 
 The moral forces which have produced 
 in China many good fruits, and some bad 
 ones, have long since ceased to exercise 
 any developing power. Chinese society 
 will never become what it might be, or 
 what it ought to be, except by the infusion 
 of a new life from without and from above. 
 
 There is a familiar passage in one of the 
 oldest Chinese classics, the Book of Odes, 
 which, in describing the palace of an ancient 
 king, shows in a striking light the relative 
 estimation at that remote time put upon 
 boys and upon girls. After speaking of 
 the dreams of the king, the poet adds a 
 couple of stanzas, which, according to Dr. 
 Legge’s translation, are as follows : — 
 
 Sons shall be born to him ; they will be put 
 to sleep on couches ; 
 
 They will be clothed in robes ; they will 
 have sceptres to play with ; 
 
 Their cry will be loud. 
 
 They will be (hereafter) resplendent with 
 red knee-covers. 
 
 The (future) king, the princes of the land. 
 
 Daughters will be born to him. They will 
 be put to sleep on the ground ; 
 
 They will be clothed with wrappers ; they 
 will have tiles to play with. 
 
 It will be theirs neither to do wrong nor to 
 do good. 
 
 Only about the spirits and the food will 
 they have to think. 
 
 And to cause no sorrow to their parents. 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2017 with funding from 
 Columbia University Libraries 
 
 \ 
 
 https://archive.org/details/naturalhistoryofOOunse 
 
THE 
 
 NATURAL HISTORY OF THE CHINESE BOY. 
 
 
 I. 
 
 The early years of a Chinese boy are 
 spent in what, viewed from the experience 
 of a decade later, must appear to him a 
 condition of supreme happiness. He is 
 welcomed to the household with a wild 
 delight, to which it is wholly impossible for 
 an Occidental to do any justice. He begins 
 life on the theory that whatever he wants, 
 that he must have ; this theory is also the 
 one acted upon by those who have him in 
 charge, to an extent which seems to us, 
 who occupy the position of impartial critics, 
 truly amazing. A Chinese mother is the 
 literal slave of her children. If they cry, 
 they must be coddled, most probably car- 
 ried about, and at whatever expense, if it 
 is possible to prevent such a terrible state 
 of things. They must not be allowed to cry 
 continuously. In this respect, at least, it 
 does not appear that there is much dis- 
 tinction between the treatment of boys and 
 girls. The age at which a boy is too large 
 to be carried is a very indefinite one, and 
 it is common to see distracted mothers 
 staggering with their little goat-feet under 
 the weight of children half their own size, 
 lugging their offspring about for the reason 
 that ‘ they would not stand it ’ to be put 
 down. A preparatory discipline of this 
 nature is not adapted to teach children 
 independence, self-control, or any useful 
 lessons, and the result is such as might 
 have been expected. But the Chinese 
 child is an eminently practical being, and 
 he finds by experience that, when there 
 are half a dozen children smaller than him- 
 self, the period of his own supreme rule 
 has passed away, and has passed away 
 never to return. To this altered condition 
 
 he soon learns to adapt himself. Of that 
 sympathy for childhood as such, which is 
 so distinguishing a part of our modern 
 civilisation, an average Chinese father has 
 no conception whatever. By this is not 
 meant that he is not fond of his children, 
 for the reverse is most palpably true. But 
 he has no capacity for entering into the 
 life of a child, and comprehending it. His 
 fondness for his children is the result of 
 the paternal instinct, and is not an intelli- 
 gent and sympathetic appreciation of the 
 mind of a child. He not only has no con- 
 ception of such a thing, but he would not 
 be able to understand what is meant by it, 
 if the possibility of such sympathy were 
 pointed out. The invariable reply to all 
 suggestions, looking toward such sympathy 
 coming from a foreigner, seems to be, 
 “ Why, he is only a mere child ! ” It is by 
 the slow moulding forces of maturing life 
 alone that the boy is expected to learn the 
 lessons of life, and these lessons he must 
 learn largely — though not altogether — by 
 himself. To most Chinese children, there 
 is very little that is attractive in their own 
 homes. The instinct of self-preservation 
 does of course lead them to fly to their 
 home, as soon as they meet with any 
 repulse from without, but this instinct 
 they share with animals. Chinese court- 
 yards are almost invariably very coirtracted, 
 and allow little scope for enterprising youth 
 to indulge in any but the most crude and 
 simple forms of amusement. The Chinese 
 lad generally has but few toys, and those 
 of the simplest and most clumsy descrip- 
 tion. At certain festivals, especially in 
 the cities, one sees the children loaded 
 down w'ith all varieties of playthings 
 
4 
 
 often of a flimsy and liiglily inox})onsive 
 cliar, actor. In the country the same pheno- 
 menon is observed wherever there has 
 been a large fair, at which the provision 
 for the children is always on a scale com- 
 mensurate with their known wants. But 
 of these articles, made of earth, paper, 
 bits of cloth, clay, reeds, .sugar, and other 
 perishable substances, nothing will be 
 left when the next moon shall have com- 
 pleted its orbit. In regions where bamboo is 
 to be had, there are a few more serviceable 
 nnd less fragile articles constructed express- 
 ly for the children, and such articles doubt- 
 less have a longer lease of life. 
 
 That Chinese parents should take occa- 
 sion to have a i\)mp with their children, or 
 even to engage with them in any game 
 wliatever, is, so far as we have observed, a 
 thing wholly outside of the range of their 
 wildest imagination. Children have very 
 few game which can be played in the 
 house, and the time which is to our little 
 ones the cream of the whole day, that 
 namely in which they can gather ‘ around 
 the evening lamp,’ is to the Chinese a 
 ])eriod of dismal obscurity. By the dim 
 light of a small and ill-trimmed wick, 
 dipped into a few' spoonsful of crude 
 vegetable oil, the evening’s occupations are 
 carried on as best they may be, but to a 
 foreigner a Chinese homo is at such times 
 must ideally comfortless, especially if the 
 season be winter. No wonder that those 
 members of the family who can do so, are 
 glad to crawl upon the more or less per- 
 fectly warmed k'ang, and wrajD themselves 
 in their wadded bed-clothes. During the 
 IKU'tion of his existence in which the father 
 and the mother of the Chinese child most 
 gladly forsake him, land Morpheus takes 
 him up, and claims him for his own. The 
 out-door games of Chinese children are 
 almost of a tamo and uninteresting type. 
 Tossing bits of earth at a mark, playing 
 shuttlecock with his heels, striking a 
 small stick sharpened at the ends so as 
 to make it jump into a ‘city,’ a species of 
 ‘ fox and geese,’ a kind of ‘ cat’s-cradle,’ a 
 variety of ‘ j.ack-stones,’ these are among 
 the most popular juvenile amusements in 
 the rural regions with which we happen to 
 be ac(tuainted. Chinese cities have allure- 
 ments of their own, some of which do not 
 dilfer essentially from those found in other 
 parts of the world than China. But even 
 in the country, where restrictions are at a 
 minimum, Chinese lads do not appear to 
 take kindly to anything which involves 
 much exercise. One does not ordinarily 
 see them running races, as foreign boys of 
 the same age cannot fail to do, and their 
 jumping and climbing are of the most 
 elementary sort. We have never heard of 
 a crow which was so injudicious as to build 
 its nest in a spot where it would be visible 
 to the eye of an Anglo-Saxon boy, unless 
 the owney of the eye had previously made a 
 
 long journey with it to a distance from all 
 human habitations. But Chinese crow's 
 build their huge nests in all sorts of trees, 
 in and about every Chinese village. It is not 
 uncommon to see an old poplar with ten or 
 twelve of these huge mats of sticks, which 
 are undisturbed from year to year and 
 from generation to generation. Buddhist 
 teachings in regard to the sacredness of 
 animal life do not suffice to account for the 
 singular inviolability which cows’-ncsts 
 enjoy in China. In a region where every 
 stick of fuel is precious, what sacredness 
 can attach to a bushel or two of large twigs, 
 when the crows have visibly done using 
 them ? Neither does superstition in regard 
 to ill-luck arising from demolition of 
 the nests of crows on account of their 
 security, although at first sight this 
 may seem to be the case. Extensive en- 
 quiries have satisfied us, that the true 
 explanation is simply the natural one, that 
 the Chinese boy is afraid to climb so high 
 as a crow’s-nest. ‘ What if he should fall V 
 says every one when aiiplied to for infor- 
 mation on the point, and it is this unan- 
 swered and unanswerable question which 
 seems to protect young Chinese crows from 
 age to age. 
 
 The Chinese boy can seldom get access 
 to running water ; that is to say, the pro- 
 portion of Chinese who can do so, is 
 infinitesimal. Most of them have no lakes, 
 river.s, or ponds in which they can plunge 
 and learn to swim, or in which they can 
 fish. The village mud-hole is the nearest 
 approach to the joys of a ‘ watering-place ’ 
 to which Chinese children can ordinarily 
 aspire. These excavations represent the 
 hole or the pit, whence the material for the 
 village houses was originally dug. During 
 the summer time, these pits, many of them 
 as large as a dry-dock, are filled to_ the 
 brim with dirty water, and at such times 
 they are sure to be surrounded by groups of 
 children clad in the costume of the garden of 
 Eden, enjoying one of the few luxuries of 
 their mundane existence. When the boys 
 are too long to indulge in this amusement, 
 there is much reason to fear that most of 
 them have taken their last bath, no matter 
 to what age their lives may be prolonged ! 
 If he cannot fish, neither can the Chinese 
 boy go a-hunting, for in the most populous 
 parts of the plains, of which so large a 
 portion of the empire is composed, there is 
 nothing to hunt. A few small birds, and 
 the common here, seem to constitute the 
 objects most frequently hunted, but except 
 in the case of the limited number of those 
 who make a business of securing such 
 game to sell as a means of support, there 
 are very few persons who devote their 
 energies to any form of hunting. Indeed, 
 the instinct which is said to lead the 
 average Englishman, to remark, “ It is a 
 fine day, let us go and kill something,” is 
 totally lacking in the Cliinese. In those 
 
5 
 
 relatively limited parts of the empire where 
 ice forms to a sufficient thickness to bear 
 the weight of human beings, one does see 
 coii'^iderable frolicking upon frozen rivers 
 and ponds. But the propulsion of the ice- 
 sleds with passengers is a matter of business 
 with those boatmen who during the season 
 of navigation have no other means of earn- 
 ing a living. Chinese children do not take 
 to them as our boys do to sleds, and even 
 if they wish to do so, their parents would 
 never dream of furnishing the children with 
 such an ice-sled simply for amusement. To 
 earn one, as a boy at home earns a sled, .or a 
 pair of skates, by doing extra- work, by pick- 
 ing up old iron, and other similar expedients, 
 would be for a Chinese lad at once a phy- 
 sical, a psychological, a moral impossibility. 
 If he lives in a treaty port, where he be- 
 comes infected by the example of foreign- 
 ers, the Chinese boy may not improbably 
 be seen laboriously pushing himself over 
 the ice on one skate, his unoccupied leg 
 being held up, like that of a contemplative 
 goose. But if the amusements of the Chi- 
 nese lad are relatively scanty and unin- 
 teresting, there is one feature of his life 
 which is fixed fact, and upon which nothing 
 is allowed to intrude. This is his work. 
 The number of Chinese children within 
 any given area is literally incalculable, but 
 it may be safely laid down as a general 
 truth, that by far the larger part of 
 these children are for the greater part of 
 their time made to do some useful work. 
 This will not of course be always true of 
 city children, for the reason that to them 
 there is frequently no work open, but it is 
 a generalisation that holds good anywhere 
 in the country. There is scarcely any 
 handicraft in which even the very smallest 
 children cannot be utilised, and it is for 
 this reason in part that hereditary occupa- 
 tions are so commonly the rule. The child 
 bred up to one mode of physical activity is 
 fitted for that, if he is fitted for nothing 
 else. If he is the son of a farmer, there is 
 a very small portion of the year during 
 which there is not some definite work for 
 him to do, by way of assisting in the culti- 
 vation of the land. This is no doubt true of 
 farming everywhere, but the unfailing in- 
 dustry of the Chinese and the heavy pressure 
 of the common poverty give to this fact an 
 emphasis not so strongly felt in other lands. 
 But even if the work on the land were to 
 be all done, which never the case until 
 the winter has actually set in, there are 
 two occupations at which the ehildren may 
 be set any time, and at which more myriads 
 of young persons are probably employed, 
 than in any other portion of the planet. 
 These two occupations are gathering fuel 
 and collecting manure. In a land where 
 the expense of transportation forbids the 
 use of coal in places distant even a few 
 miles from the mouth of the pit, it is neces- 
 sary to depend upon what comes from the soil 
 
 in any particular place, for fuel to cook the 
 food and furnish such warmth as can be got. 
 Not a stalk, not a twig, not a leaf is wasted. 
 Even at the best, the products of a field ill 
 suffice in the item of fuel for the wants of 
 those who own it. The Chinese habit of 
 constantly drinking hot water, which must 
 be funished a fresh as often as it cools, and 
 for each chance comer, consumes a vast 
 amount of fuel, over and above what would 
 be strictly required for the preparation of 
 food. The collection and storage of the 
 fuel supply is an affair second in importance 
 only to the gathering of the crops. But in 
 every village, a considerable although 
 varying proportion of the population is to 
 be found, who own no land. These people 
 pick up a precarious living as they can, by 
 working for others who have land, but their 
 remuneration is slight, and often wholly 
 insufficient for the food supply of the 
 many mouths clamouring to be filled. F or 
 the fuel wherewith to cook the exiguous 
 supplies of this uncertain food, the family 
 is wholly dependent upon what the children 
 can scratch together. Any intermission of 
 this labour is scarcely less a check upon 
 the means of existence, than the interrup- 
 tion of the work of the ‘breadwinner’ 
 himself. In this dismal struggle for a 
 basket full of leaves and weeds, the children 
 of China expend annually incomputable 
 millenniums of work. In the midst of such 
 a barren wilderness as constitutes the life 
 of most Chinese children, anything which 
 breaks the dull monotony is welcomed with 
 keen joy. The feast-days, the annual or 
 semi-annual fairs held at some neighbouring 
 town, and occasional theatrical exhibition, 
 and the unfailing succession of weddings 
 and funerals, all serve as happy reliefs 
 to the unceasing grind of daily toil. Mid- 
 way between the most important and the 
 least important of these relaxations is to be 
 reckoned the chance arrival in the village 
 of a foreigner. By that subtle instinct 
 which philosophy does little or nothing to 
 explain, all the children in the country-side 
 seem to have ascertained the fact of this 
 arrival simultaneously, no matter what 
 pains the traveller may have taken to 
 conceal himself in his conveyance. They 
 gather with the keen scent of the buzzard 
 waiting for the expiring camel, and every 
 movement of the strange being is a source 
 of keen joy to the gathered multitudes of 
 children, whose joy are of the fewest and 
 most inconsiderable type. Whenever the 
 traveller in the inn-yard is tempted to 
 empty his wash-dish on the ragged swarming 
 crowd of eagerly curious youth about him, 
 let him pause to reflect, that for tliem 
 life has at best not too many pleasures, 
 and that one of these is the foreigner, 
 necessarily transitory and always inscru- 
 table, and not to be rudely taken from 
 those who are best qualified t.3 enjoy 
 him. When tempted to hurl objurgations 
 
G 
 
 at the too pervasive, the too curious, the 
 too irrepressible, but obviously happy 
 Chinese children who swarm about him, 
 the Occidental tourist might do- well to 
 recall an observation made by a criminal 
 in an English police court. When imiios- 
 ing the sentence, the justice reprimanded j 
 the prisoner for being drunk and disorderly 
 and for. miscellaneous cracking of the skulls 
 of innocent spectators. The culprit replied 
 simply : “ Yes, yer ’onor, but it’s a poor 
 ’art as never rejoices ! ” 
 
 II. 
 
 We have often tried to imagine the nature 
 of the report which the great Swiss educator, 
 Pestalozzi, and his greater pupil, Froebel, 
 would have indited, had they been sent to 
 China to examine the ‘ school system ’ of 
 that empire. The essence of the teaching 
 and practice of these world-renowned edu- 
 cators was that the pedagogue must enter 
 into the life and being of the child whom he 
 teaches, and must summon the mental facul- 
 ties by a natural process, leading them on 
 step by step without fatigue and with de- 
 lighted interest, until the pupil has in reality 
 taught himself -B'hat he needs most to know. 
 The essence of Chinese teaching is to in- 
 troduce mental concepts into the minds of 
 the scholars, just as lime is worked into 
 the texture of the cashbags used all over 
 the empire, by incessant pounding on a 
 resisting surface. 
 
 When a Chinese boy has attained the age 
 of seven and eight years, the question is 
 sometimes raised whether he shall be sent 
 to school. We say “sometimes,” for it is 
 but a minute fraction of the wliole number 
 of Chinese boys who ever see the inside of a 
 school-room, and of that small fraction 
 but a miscroscopic part ever continue their 
 studies to such a point as to make any 
 practical use of what has been learned. 
 
 The Chinese language, as may be known 
 to some of our readers, is of a pictorial 
 nature. The almost infinite variety of its 
 characters may all be distributed into a com- 
 paratively small number of genera, and 
 these again into a large number of species. 
 To us the inordinatelyla rge mass of unfamiliar 
 symbols seems a load too great to be borne 
 by any single mind, but that is mainly be- 
 cause we come to them from across a wide 
 gulf, and are not to the manner born. If 
 Chinese were the native tongue of any con- 
 siderable number of Anglo-Saxons (the 
 reader will kindly pardon the self-contradic- 
 tory nature of the supposition, for the 
 sake of the conclusion to be drawn) it 
 would not be long ere a way would be 
 invented by which the study of Chinese 
 characters and idioms would be made 
 simple and even attractive to the youthful 
 Saxon-Chinese who were obliged to under- 
 take the task of learning. What that 
 process would be, we positively decline to 
 explain, but we have no hesitation in affirm- 
 
 ing, in general terms, that it would be as 
 nearly as possible the exact opposite of 
 the process to which every Chinese boy is 
 subjected as soon as he enters las school, 
 and as long as he stays in it. 
 
 It is a truly amazing fact, that among the 
 tens of millions of educated Chinese, who 
 are constantly employed in attempting to 
 educate children and youth, there never 
 arises a single one who, perceiving the fatal 
 folly of the means now in use (and which so 
 far as we know has always been in use), has 
 the intelligence to introduce a better way. 
 Probably there have been such attempts ; 
 there surely must have been, but the rooted 
 conservatism of the people has immediately 
 defeated them. This is rendered in- 
 evitable by the fact that the object of 
 education is supposed to be, not the learn- 
 ing acquired, much less the discipline of 
 mind gained in acquiring it, but a literary 
 degree. The pursuit of a degree is the 
 kernel of the whole system of Chinese 
 education. The examination halls, in every 
 prefectural city, are as a rule chocked with 
 aspirants for the lower degree, but a 
 small number of whom can possibly attain 
 it. But the whole theory of Chinese educa- 
 tion is based upon the supposition that each 
 child who studies at all, mud be put in 
 training for the whole course, covering a 
 period varying from ten years or more, to a 
 whole life-time. During the first five or six 
 years of the young scholar’s life at school, 
 there is ordinarily not a single oasis of 
 any size in the whole vast desert which he 
 has traversed. One of his first achievements 
 is the memorising and recognition by sight 
 of the characters in the Family Surmanes. 
 The utility of this study is obvious at a 
 glance, but a table of logarithms could 
 scarcely be more uninterested. It is a 
 characteristic Chinese circumstance, that 
 many of the editions of these surmanes 
 are very far indeed from being complete, 
 as tested by the lists of characters which in 
 K‘anghi’s Dictionary are given as in use for 
 this purpose. The Trimetrical Classic 
 contains but few lines which could he of 
 any human interest to a Chinese child or 
 any other, and whatever transient gleams 
 of interest might attach to these exceptional 
 lines, is effectually strangled in its birth, by 
 the universal Chinese habit of not giving 
 any explanations of anytliing which is 
 studied, until the pupil has studied for 
 many years, by which time it is thought that 
 nature has developed his mental powers 
 (which his teacher has done his utmost to 
 extinguish) to such a point that he is able to 
 comprehend explanations ! There is a story 
 of a pupil in a Latin class who construed 
 the line ; 
 
 ‘ Exegi monumentum cere perennius,’ 
 
 ‘ I have eaten a monument of brass,’ in con- 
 sideration of which fact he was ordered by 
 his professor to ‘ Sit down and digest it, 
 then.’ Scarcely any description of the 
 
occupation of the Chinese lad at school could 
 he more comprehensively accurate than 
 this somewhat inadequate translation of 
 Horace. The pupil has indeed swallowed 
 not one monument, but all the principal 
 monuments of antiquity, but as for digest- 
 ing them, that is a process which neither 
 he nor his preceptor ever thought of. The 
 pupil resembles an infant camel which 
 should be required to take in food and water 
 sufficient for a whole life-time in the desert, 
 and to do it, so to speak, at a single sitting ! 
 There is reason to fear that in all parts of 
 the world, children are tempted to look 
 back upon their shool-days, especially the 
 earliest ones, as the period when their 
 joys do least abound. Their views are 
 expressed with precision by the little girl 
 who, being asked if she liked her school, 
 answered ‘Yes,’ but upon being pressed to 
 explain what it was that she liked, she in- 
 genuously replied, “Coming home.” The 
 poor Chinese lad, however, has this pleasure 
 in anticipation for a great length of time, 
 as his school begins soon after sunrise, or 
 even earlier, and with short intermission at 
 noon for his dinner lasts till dark. When 
 the midday meal is despatched, he returns 
 to the school-house, not to play in the yard, 
 but to drop into his place and sit like an 
 earthenware image until the rest shall have 
 arrived also, when the monotonous din of 
 the bellowing, by whieh the lessons are 
 supposed to be transferred to the memory 
 of the learner, shows that the educational 
 process is literally in full blast. There are 
 in the life of this book-ridden lad no 
 joyous Saturdays, and no regular holidays 
 of any sort except such as he can beg 
 or steal. Each scholar being a class by 
 himself, his absence is of no consequence 
 to any one else, and the teacher not infre- 
 quently pays no attention to the non- 
 appearance of any particular pupil, who 
 has therefore every motive to absent him- 
 self as often as he can. 
 
 III. 
 
 It is no exaggeration to say that there is 
 nothing really intellectual in any part of 
 the early schooling of an ordinary Chinese 
 boy. As a rule the teacher does not concern 
 himself with his pupils, further than to 
 drag them over a specified course, or at 
 least to attempt to do so. The parents of the 
 lad are equally indifferent, or even more so. 
 If the father can himself read, he remembers 
 that he learned to do so by a long and thorny 
 road, and he thinks it natural that his son 
 should traverse it likewise. If he cannot 
 read, he recognises the fact that he knows 
 nothing at all about the matter, and that it, 
 is not his business to interfere. The teacher 
 is hired to teach — let him do it. At home 
 the pupil has no mental stimulus of any 
 sort, no books, magazines or papers, and 
 if he had them, his barren studies at school 
 would not have fitted him to comprehend 
 
 .such literature. The range of characters 
 which he has learned, often very imper- 
 fectly, is totally different from those in com- 
 mon use, and largely of no value except 
 as a step to the classics. If the pupil goes 
 on, as a small proportion of them do, after 
 having theoretically mastered the classics, 
 to study literary composition, his tasks are far 
 more difficulty than before. Chinese compo- 
 sition is an exceedingly intricate study, and 
 requires a highly developed memory, wide 
 acquaintance with the written character, 
 and a patience which must be almost infinite. 
 For those who do not go so far as to learn 
 to compose, their education may be said to 
 be finished before it is fairly under way. 
 When it is dead and hurried, as it not im- 
 probably will be within a few years, it 
 might appropriately have carved upon its 
 tomb-stone, the epitaph said to have marked 
 the resting place of a still-born infant, 
 
 ‘ Since so quickly I am done for, 
 
 I wonder what I was begun for.’ 
 
 Considering the utter juicelessness of his 
 studies, which are not inaptly compared to 
 ‘gnawing a wooden pear,’ it is by no 
 means singular that the great majority of 
 pupils when they leave school, cast aside 
 all their little stock of learning, as a worn- 
 out pair of shoes belonging to their early 
 days, but of no subsequent value. Not- 
 withstanding the vast number of books in 
 the lists of Chinese literature, there are 
 very few which are popularly available. 
 The books to be found in an average 
 Chinese house, albeit some of the inmates 
 can ‘ read,’ are generally scant in number, 
 and limited in range — perhaps the one most 
 sure to have been read, is the historical 
 novel called the ‘ Three Kingdoms. ’ But 
 the style and the characters are alike far 
 beyond the capacity of most lads who 
 have had only five or six years of 
 schooling. The cheap little books which 
 are everywhere sold, are full of false 
 characters, badly printed, and so difficult 
 to comprehend for a boy with but a limited 
 knowledge, but they might as well be 
 written in Egyptian hieroglyphics. The 
 practical result is, that the whole education 
 of a vast number of Chinese boys has tlie 
 same relation to their subsequent life, as a 
 familiarity with the ‘ tones ’ of the Greek 
 language, has to the business career of the 
 man who has graduated from an English 
 university. Ten years from Oxford, what 
 signifies it (to any one but a professor of 
 Greek) that “ in the genitive plural of the 
 first declension of Greek nouns, the final 
 syllable is circumflexed, but that feminine 
 adjectives, and participles in os e on are 
 accented like the genitive masculine, but 
 other feminine adjectives and participles 
 are perispomena in the genitive plural, and 
 that chrestes, aphue, etesiai, and ehlowies 
 in the genitive plural remain paroxy tones ” ? 
 Happily there are other items in the liberal 
 
8 
 
 education of an English student, which 
 will probably abide with him, while in the 
 case of a vast multitude of Chinese lads, 
 almost the whole of what they have with 
 such incredible labour acquired, will 
 vanish like the morning cloud and the 
 early dew, and like the baseless fabric of 
 a vision, leave not a wrack behind. 
 
 There is one incident in the life of the 
 Chinese lad, which assumes in his eyes 
 some degree of importance, to which most 
 occidental boys are strangers. This is the 
 ceremony of donning the cap, in other 
 words of becoming a man and his marriage. 
 The age at which this takes place is far 
 from being a fixed one, but is often in the 
 vicinity of sixteen. The customs observed 
 doubtless vary, in the rural districts they 
 frequently consist in nothing more exciting 
 than the playing by a band of music in the 
 evening before his marriage, and a visit on 
 the part of the young man to each house in 
 the village where he makes his prostration, 
 much as at the New Year, and is hence- 
 forth to be considered a full-grown man, 
 and is protected to some extent from 
 snubs because he is ‘only a child.’ The 
 more conspicuous part of the aflair, how- 
 ever, is the wedding. This proceeding 
 is based upon principles so radically dif- 
 ferent from those to which we are accus- 
 tomed, that it is generally hard for a 
 Westerner to become reconciled either to 
 the Chinese theory or to the practice. To 
 us, marriage seems suitable for persons 
 who have attained, not merely years of 
 puberty, but a certain maturity of develop- 
 ment, compatible with the new relatinns 
 which they now assume. We regard the 
 man and wife as the basis and centre of a new 
 family, and there is ancient and adequate 
 authority for the doctrine that they 
 should leave father and mother. In 
 China it is altogether otherwise. The boy 
 and girl who are married are not a new 
 family, but the latest branch in a tall 
 family tree, independent of which they 
 have no corporate existence. It is by no 
 means uncommon for boys to be married 
 at the age of ten, although this is regarded 
 as a trifle premature. The physical, in- 
 tellectual, or moral development of the 
 parties concerned, has nothing whatever 
 to do with the matter of their marriage, 
 which is an aflair controlled by wholly 
 diflerent considerations. Sometimes it is 
 hastened because an old grandmother is in 
 feeble health and insists upon seeing the 
 main business of life done up, before she is 
 called away. Sometimes the motive is to 
 settle the division of a piece of property so 
 that it shall be impossible for the elder 
 heirs to retreat from the settlement. Quite 
 as often, the real motive for hastening the 
 wedding is the felt need in the boy’s 
 family of an additional servant, which need 
 will be supplied by the introduction of a 
 new bride. It is for this reason that so 
 
 many Chinese women are older than their 
 husbands. When they are betrothed, the 
 bigger they are the better, because tliey 
 can do all the more work. To a Chinese, 
 there is no more sense of incongruity in 
 marrying a little slip of a boy, simply 
 because he is young, and perhaps not 
 more than half the size of his bride, 
 than tliere would be in playing checkers 
 with buttons, and then crowning the first 
 button that happened to get to the king 
 row. What signified whether the button 
 is a small one or a large one since it 
 has reached the last row, and has now a set 
 of moves of its own, a fact which must be 
 recognised by doubling itself. It is not 
 otherwise with the Chinese boy. He is a 
 double button, it is true, but he is nothing 
 but a button still and a small one, and is 
 but an insignificant part of a wide and com- 
 plicated game. During the celebration of 
 a Chinese wedding it does not strike the 
 spectator that the bridegroom is the centre 
 of interest, and the bride is so only for 
 the time being and in consequence of the 
 curiosity which is felt to see whac sort of a 
 bargain the family has made in getting her. 
 The young man is ordered out of the 
 apartment wdiere he has been kept in 
 ambush — according to the customs in some 
 regions — like an ox for the sacrifice. He is 
 to fall upon his knees at a word of command, 
 and k‘o Vo with intermittent sequence to a 
 great variety of persons, until his knees are 
 stifland his legs lame. His eyes are fixed upon 
 theground, as if in deepest humility, and the 
 most awkward Chinese youth will perform 
 the details of this trying ordeal with a 
 natural grace, with which the most well- 
 bred occidental youth could scarcely hope 
 to vie, and which he' assuredly could not 
 hope to surpass. When the complicated pro- 
 tracted ceremonies are all over, our young 
 lad is, it is true, a married man, but he is 
 not the ‘ head’ of any family, not even of 
 his own. He is still under the same control 
 of his father as before, his bride is under 
 the control of the mother-in-law, to a degree 
 which it is difficult for us to comprehend. 
 If the youthful husband is trying to learn 
 to compose essays, his marriage does not at 
 all interrupt his educational enterprise and 
 as soon as the ceremonies are over, he goes 
 on just as before. If he is dull, and cannot 
 make the ‘ seven empty particles ’ — the 
 terror of the inexpert Chinese essayist — fit 
 into his laborious sentences to the satisfac- 
 tion of his teacher, he is not unUkely to be 
 beaten over the head for his lack of critical 
 acumen, and can then go weeping home to 
 have his wife stick a black gummy plaster 
 over the area of his chastisement. We 
 have known a Chinese boy who had the 
 dropsy in an aggravated form but who could 
 not be persuaded to take a single dose of 
 medicine that was at all bitter. If he 
 was pressed to do so by his fond mother, 
 he either ‘ rowed,’ or cried. If he was not 
 
9 
 
 allowed to eat two whole water-melons at a 
 time his tactics were the same, a domestic 
 scene either of violent temper, or of dismal 
 howling grief. He was merely prolonging 
 into youth the plan universally adopted in 
 the childhood of Chinese children. Yet 
 this sensitive infant of seventeen, had been 
 married for several years, and leaves a 
 widow to mourn tlie circumstance that 
 drugs, dropsy, and water-melons, have 
 blighted her existence. 
 
 The Chinese boy generally learns well 
 two valuable lessons, and the thoroughness 
 with which they are mastered does much 
 to atone for the great defects of his training 
 in other regards. He learns obedience and 
 respect for authority, and he learns to be 
 industrious. In most cases, tlie latter 
 quality is the condition of his continued 
 existence and those who refuse to submit 
 to the inexorable law, are disposed of by 
 that law, to the great advantage of the 
 survivors. But of intellectual independ- 
 ence, he has not the faintest conception or 
 even a capacity of comprehension. He 
 does as others do, and neither knows nor 
 can imagine any other way. If he is 
 ‘ educated,’ his mind is like a subsoil pipe, 
 filled with all the drainage which has ever 
 run through the ground. A part of this 
 drainage originally came it is true from the 
 
 skies, but it has been considerably altered 
 in its constituents since that time ; and a 
 mucli larger part is a wholly human secre- 
 tion, painfully lacking in chemical purity. 
 In any case this is the content of his mind, 
 and it is all of its content If, on the other 
 hand, the Chinese youth is uneducated, 
 his mind is like an open ditch, partly 
 vacant, and partly full of whatever is flow- 
 ing or blowing over the surface. He is not 
 indeed destitute of humility, in fact, he has 
 a most depressing amount of it. He knows 
 that he knows nothing, that he never did, 
 never shall, never can know anything, and 
 also that it makes very little difference what 
 he knows. He has a blind respect for 
 learning, but no idea of gathering any 
 crumbs thereof for himself. The long, 
 broad black and hopeless shadow of Con- 
 fucianism is over him. It means a high 
 degree of intellectual cultivation for the 
 few, who are necessarily narrow and often 
 bigoted, and for the many it means a life- 
 time of intellectual stagnation. Measured 
 by what it has totally failed to do, when it 
 nright and should have done it, we charge 
 Confucianism with being intellectually one 
 of the most elaborate, compendious, and far- 
 reaching failures, which has ever wrought 
 out its ultimate results upon this distracted 
 earth ! 
 
 THE 
 
 NATURAL HISTORY OF THE CHINESE GIRL. 
 
 I. 
 
 The Chinese are as practical a people as 
 ever had a national existence, and we know 
 of no reason to suppose that the Chinese 
 ever had the least doubt that a substantial 
 equality of the sexes in point of numbers 
 is a condition of the continued propagation 
 of the race. Certainly no race was ever 
 more careful to keep itself propagated, or 
 has ever met with greater success in the 
 undertaking. How happens it, then, that 
 the Chinese are almost the only people 
 boasting an ancient and developed civilisa- 
 tion who despise their own daughters 
 who are married into the families 
 of others, and are by that process lost to 
 their own 1 and because according to ancient 
 custom they can ofler no sacrifices for 
 their parents, when the latter are dead. 
 It is for this reason that the popular 
 saying declares that the most ideally excel- 
 lent daughter (literally a daughter with 
 the virtues of the eighteen Lo-hans) is not 
 equal to a splay-footed son. This sentiment 
 
 is endorsed by all Chinese consciously and 
 unconsciously, in a manner to show that it 
 is in woven in the very fibres of their being. 
 Its ultimate root is the same as that of so 
 many other human opinio n s, pure selfishness. 
 
 The Chinese girl when she makes her 
 first appearance in the world is very 
 likely to be unweld ime, though this is by 
 no means invariably the case. The ratio 
 in which fortune-tellers allot hapjuness is 
 generally about five sons to two daugliters. 
 “ Whatsoever is more than these cometh of 
 evil.” With theories like those of the 
 Chinese about the unavailability of daugh- 
 ters for the performance of ancestral rites, 
 and with the Chinese nature as it is, it is 
 not to be wondered at that the great 
 pressure of poverty leads to the crime 
 of infanticide upon an enormous scale. 
 For aught that appears, this has al- 
 ways been the case. It is not that the 
 Chinese conscience does not recognise the 
 murder of girl babies as wrong, but that 
 the temptation to such murder, especially 
 
10 
 
 the temptation to tlie disappointed and 
 often abused mother, is too strong to be 
 resisted by any motives which have the 
 opportunity to act upon her. Much has 
 already been done by those who have had 
 most opportunity to learn the facts, toward 
 exhibiting the real practice of the Chinese 
 in the matter of destroying female infants. 
 Yet no more can be safely predicated than 
 that this is a crime which to some extent 
 everywhere prevails, and in some places 
 to such a degree as seriously to affect 
 the proportion of the sexes. It seems to 
 be most common in the maritime provinces 
 of the southern part of China, in some 
 districts of which it is by the Chinese tliem- 
 selves regarded as a terrible and a threaten- 
 ing evil. Native tract societies publish 
 books exhorting the people against the 
 practice, and magistrates occasionally is.sue 
 proclamations forbidding it, but it is 
 evident that the nature of the offence is 
 sucli that no laws can touch it, and 
 nothing short of the elevation of the mo- 
 thers themselves to a far higher point of 
 view than they now occupy, can have any 
 permanent effect upon Chinese female in- 
 fanticide. Next to the destruction of the 
 lives of female infants, the Chinese prac- 
 tice most revolting to our western ideas 
 is the sale of their daughters, at all periods 
 from infancy up to a marriageable age. 
 The u.sages of different parts of the empire 
 v'ary widely, but the sale of girls, like 
 infanticide, seems to flourish most in the 
 maritime provinces of the south, where it 
 is conducted as ojjenly as any other traffic. 
 That the parents are generally impelled to 
 this extreme step simply by the pressure 
 of poverty we are quite ready to believe. 
 Yet the knowledge that the girl must be 
 parted from her family at a later period, 
 and that this parting is irrevocable, must 
 tend to reconcile many Chinese parents to 
 an anticipation, by a few years, of the in- 
 evitable. Of the miseries which girls who 
 have been thus sold are likely to endure, it 
 is unnecessary to speak in detail, but enough 
 is known on the subject to lead us to 
 regard the practice with horror. If the 
 parents do not feel able to keep their 
 daughter until she is old enough to be 
 married, and yet do not wish to sell her, 
 Cliinese custom has invented another ex- 
 pedient, which is a compromise between 
 the two. 
 
 This is the well known “rearing-mar- 
 riage, ” by which the girl is made over to the 
 family into which she is to be married, and 
 is by that family brought up, and married 
 whenever their convenience dictates. There 
 are manifest and grave objections to this 
 practice, but there can be no doubt that it 
 is far better than the custom of child mar- 
 riages, which lead to so much wretchedness 
 in India. In some instances the relations 
 with the family of the girl are wholly broken 
 off, when she is taken for a “rearing- 
 
 marriage, "and in all cases it is regarded as a 
 confession of poverty and weakness, which 
 places the girl’s family at much more than 
 their usual disadvantage, at be.st suffi- 
 ciently great. When a girl is bi’ought up in 
 the family the son of which is to become 
 her future husband, it is of course wholly 
 out of the question that the parties should 
 not have the fullest opportunities to become 
 acquainted with each other’s disposition, 
 however they may be forbidden by usage 
 to speak to one another. There is and 
 can be very little sentiment about Chi- 
 nese matches, but anything which tends to 
 make the parties to one of these matches 
 better able to adapt themselves to the 
 inevitable friction of after life, cannot fail 
 to have its advantages. Whether the 
 parties to a “ rearing-marriage” are or are 
 not on the whole happier than those married 
 in the ordinary way, is a question which no 
 Chinese would be likely to ask, for the 
 reason that he has no associations connect- 
 ing marriage with happiness, but rather 
 the reverse, and if the question is proposed 
 by a foreigner, he is not likely to be made 
 much the wiser by the replies which he 
 receives. 
 
 The practice of binding the feet of Chi- 
 nese girls is familiar to all who have the 
 smallest knowledge of China, and requires 
 but the barest mention. It is almost 
 universal throughout China, yet with some 
 conspicuous exeptions, as among the Hak- 
 kas of the south, an exception for which it 
 is not easy to account. The custom for- 
 cibly illustrates some of the innate traits 
 of Chinese character, especially the readi- 
 ness to endure great and prolonged suffer- 
 ing in attaining to a standard, merely for 
 the sake of appearances. There is no other 
 non-religious custom peculiar to the Chinese 
 which is so utterly opposed to the natural 
 instincts of mankind, and yet which is at the 
 same time so dear to theOhinese, and which 
 would be given up with more reluctance. 
 
 It is well-known that the greatest em- 
 peror who ever sat upon the throne of 
 China dared not risk his authority in an 
 attempt to put down this custom, although 
 his father had successfully imposed upon 
 the Chinese race the wearing of the queue 
 as a badge of subjection. A quarter of a 
 millennium of Tartar rule seems to have 
 done absolutely nothing towards modifying 
 the practice of foot-binding in favour of the 
 more rational one of the governing race, 
 except to a limited extent in the capital 
 itself. But a few li away from Peking, the 
 old habits hold their iron sway, and unless 
 some powerful force from without should 
 be brought to bear, will apparently continue 
 to do so until the end of time. 
 
 The observations which may be made 
 with regard to the industry of Chinese 
 boys, are equally applicabble — mntatis mu- 
 tandis — to Chinese girls. In all lands and 
 in all climes, “ woman’s work is never 
 
11 
 
 ‘done ”, and this is most especially true of 
 China, where machinery has not yet ex- 
 pelled the primitive processes of what is 
 literally manufacture, or w’ork by the hand. 
 The care of silk- worms, and the picking, 
 spinning, and weaving of cotton, are largely 
 the labour of women, to which the girls are 
 introduced at a very early age. The sewing 
 for a Chinese family is a serious matter, 
 especially as the number of families who 
 can afford to hire help in this line is a very 
 trifling proportion. But aside from this 
 employment, in which a Chinese girl who 
 expects to be acceptable to the family of 
 her mother-in-law must be expert., girls can 
 also be made useful in almost any line of 
 home work to which the father may be 
 devoted. In the country districts all over 
 the empire, boys and girls alike are sent out 
 to scratch together as much fuel as possible, 
 for the jn’eparation of the food, and this 
 continues in the case of the girls until 
 they are too large to go to any distance from 
 home. It is not an unmeaning appellation, 
 which is given to girls generally, that of 
 ya-t‘ou, or “slave-girl,” used just as we 
 should say “daughter.” To a foreigner, 
 this sounds much like the term “ nigger ” 
 applied to black men, but to the Chinese 
 there is a fitness in tlie designation, which 
 they refuse to surrender. 
 
 With the exception of such limited raids 
 as she may have been able to make in early 
 childhood, and occasional visits to rela- 
 tives, most Chinese girls never go anywhere, 
 to speak of, and live what is literally the 
 existence of a frog in a well. Tens of thou- 
 sands of them have never been two miles 
 away from the village in which they hap- 
 pened to be born, with the occasional ex- 
 ception of the visit to the mother’s family 
 just mentioned, where they are not impro- 
 bably regarded as terrible beings who can- 
 not be exterminated, but who are to be 
 as much as possible repressed. If the 
 nieces on the mother’s side are numerous, 
 as is often the case, there is some reason 
 for dread of the visits, on the part of the 
 bread-winners, for no Chinese mother can 
 be dissociated from her flock of children, 
 whose appetites are invariably several horse- 
 power strong, and who, like their elders, 
 are all excessively fond of enjoying “the 
 rare and ineffable pleasure of eating at 
 somebody else’s expense.” 
 
 It is when the married daughters of a 
 large family have all returned to their 
 parents to spend a few days or weeks, 
 that the most dramatic scenes of childhood 
 occur. Self-control and unselfishness have 
 not been a feature in the culture of any 
 one of the numerous cousins thus brought 
 together in a cluster which frequently 
 resembles those on the inside of a bee-hive. 
 Each of the young generation has the 
 keenest instinct for getting as much of the 
 best of what is to be had, as any one else, 
 and if possible more. Tliis leads to occa- 
 
 sional “ scenes of confusion, and creature 
 complaints”, in which each small participant 
 publishes his or her version of the particular 
 squabble in question in acrid tones, which 
 soon summon the whole establishment to 
 the scene of action. Judicious parents 
 would punish the children all round for 
 their complicity in such a’ quarrel, which 
 is most often based upon alleged or sup- 
 posed inequalities in distribution of food. 
 But Chinese parents are seldom judicious, 
 and the most that can be expected is that 
 the mother will call off her child or children, 
 and “yell” it, or them. “Yelling” a 
 person is the act of proclaiming in a loud and 
 piercing voice the disapprobation on the part 
 of the “yeller” of the conduct of the “ yel- 
 lee, ” often accompanied by reviling language, 
 and frequently also with promises to “beat” 
 and “ kill ” the said “yellee” in the event 
 of further provocation. These remarks are 
 interpi’eted by the “yellee” as a hint to 
 “shut up”, a feat which is at length accom- 
 plished after a period of more or less 
 spasmodic and convulsive recrimination. 
 But if, as often happens, each of the mothers 
 feels called upon from a high sense of duty 
 to take a firm stand for the rights of her off- 
 spring, the case becomes much more serious. 
 Each of the mothers will then scream simul- 
 taneously, to the accompaniment of the 
 W'ails, yells, and reviling of the whole dozen 
 or more of her posterity, while above the 
 general clamour may be distinctly caught the 
 shrill shrieks of the grandmother, whose 
 views, whatever difficulty they may have in 
 getting themselves heard, must eventually 
 prevail when peace once more reigns in the 
 domestic tea-pot. After one of these family 
 cyclones, the atmosphere gradually becomes 
 cleared again, and things go on as before ; 
 butwehave known a particularly “spunky ” 
 married daughter, who exhibited her dis- 
 satisfaction with the terms of settlement of 
 a dispute of this sort by refusing to speak 
 to her sisters, for some days together. 
 
 With the humdrum routine of her life at 
 home, the occasional visits to relatives, 
 and now and then a large fair or a theatrical 
 exhibition, the Chinese girl grows to be 
 what we should call a “ young school-girl,” 
 by which time all her friends begin to be 
 very uneasy about her. This uneasiness, 
 we need scarcely remark, has not the smal- 
 lest connection with her intellectual nature, 
 which, so far as any culture which it receives 
 is concerned, might as well be non-existent. 
 Unless her father happens to be a school- 
 master, and at home with nothing to do, 
 he never thinks of teaching his daughter to 
 read. Even in the case of boys, this would 
 be exceptional and irregular, but in the 
 case of girls it is felt to be preposterous. 
 And why '? asks the incredulous foreigner. 
 It will t;iko tlie average Chinese a long time 
 to get at the nature of his objection, stripped 
 of superfluous verbiage, and when he does so 
 he will not have stated the whole of the 
 
case, nor have gone to the root of the 
 matter. The real difficulty is, that to 
 educate a girl is like weeding the held of 
 some other man. It is like putting a gold 
 chain around the neck of some one else’s 
 puppy, which may at any moment be 
 whistled off, and then what has become of 
 the chain ? It is a proverbially mean man 
 in China, who, when marrying his daughter, 
 wants to be paid for the food he has wasted 
 upon her up to the date of marriage. But 
 the expression illustrates clearly one of 
 the underlying assumptions of Chinese 
 society, that it is the body of the girl for 
 which the parents are responsible, and not 
 the mind. To almost any Chinese, it would 
 probably appear a self-evident proposition 
 that to spend time, strength, and much more 
 money in educating the daughter-in-law of 
 some else is a sheer waste. But, you say 
 tq him, she is your daughter. “Not after 
 she is married,” he replies ; “ she is theirs, 
 let them educate her themselves if they 
 want her educated.” 
 
 “Why should I teach her how to read, 
 write and reckon, when it will never do 
 me any good?” With which utilitarian 
 inquiry, the education of most Chinese girls 
 has been banished from human thought 
 for the space of some millenniums. 
 
 ii. 
 
 The anxiety which all her friends begin 
 to feel about a Chinese girl, as soon as she 
 attains any considerable size, is exhibited 
 in the inquiries which are made about her 
 whenever she hajjpens to be spoken of. 
 These inquiries do not concern her character 
 or her domestic accomplishments, much less 
 her intellectual capacity — of which she has, 
 theoretically, none to speak of — but they 
 may all be summed up in the single phrase, 
 “Is she said meaning by theterm “said” 
 “ betrothed.” If the reply should be in the 
 negative, the intelligence is received in 
 much the same way as we should receive 
 the information that a foreign child had 
 been allowed to grow to the age of sixteen 
 without having been taught anything what- 
 ever out of books. “Why?”, we should 
 say ; “what is the explanation of this 
 .strange neglect?” The instinctive feeling 
 of a Chinese in regard to a girl is that she 
 should be betrothed as soon as possible. 
 This is one of the many points in regard to 
 whicli it is almost impossible for the 
 Chinese and the Anglo-Saxon to come to 
 terms. To the latter the betrothal of a mere 
 child, scarcely in her teens, is a piece of 
 absolute barbarity. As soon as a Chinese 
 girl is once betrothed, she is placed in 
 different relations to the universe gene- 
 rally. She is no longer allowed such freedom 
 as hitherto, although that may have been 
 little enough. She cannot go anywhere, 
 because it would be “ inconvenient ”. She 
 might be seen by some member of the 
 family into which she is to marry. 
 
 than which it is hardly possible to 
 think of anything more horrible. ‘ ' Why ? ” 
 the irrepressible Occidental inquires, and 
 is quenched by the information that 
 “it would not be proper.” Why it would 
 not be proper no one can ever tell, 
 except that it never was proper, and 
 therefore is not so now, and therefore 
 never will be. The imminent risk that 
 the girl might in some unguarded moment 
 be actually seen by the family of the future 
 mother-in-law is a reason why so few en 
 gagements for girls are made in the town 
 ill which the girl lives, an arrangement 
 which would seem to be for the convenience 
 of all parties, in a great variety of ways. 
 It would put a stop to the constant de- 
 ceptions practised by the middle-women, 
 or professional match-makers, whose only 
 object is to carry through whatever match 
 has been proposed, in order to reap the 
 percentage which will Accrue to the agent. 
 It would do away with the waste of time 
 and money involved in transporting bi-ides 
 from one of their homes to the other, often 
 at great inconvenience and loss. It would 
 make the interchange of little courtesies 
 between the families easy and frequent. 
 But for all these advantages the Chinese 
 do not seem to care, and the most frequent 
 explanation of the neglect of them is that 
 there would be the risk already mentioned. 
 When these two families are such as 
 would in the ordinary course of events 
 be likely to meet, nothing is more amus- 
 ing to a foreigner than to watch the 
 struggles which are made to avert such 
 a catastrophe. One is reminded of some 
 of our childhood’s games, in which one 
 party is “ poison” and the other party is 
 liable to be “poisoned” and must at all 
 hazards keep out of the way. The only 
 difference between the cases is that in the 
 Chinese game, each party is afraid of being 
 “poisoned,” and will struggle to prevent it. 
 There is one set of circumstances, however, 
 in which, despite their utmost efforts. Fate 
 is too much both for the poisoners and the 
 poisoned. If during the betrothal a death 
 of an older person takes place in the family 
 of the mother-in-law, it is generally thought 
 necessary that the girl (who is considered as 
 already “belonging” tothatfamily) should be 
 present and should perform the same rever- 
 ence to the coffin of the deceased as if she 
 had been already married. She is (theore- 
 tically) their daughter ; why should she not 
 come and lament like the rest ?* If it is 
 possible to arrange it, however, the iiiarri- 
 
 * We have known occasional instances in 
 which a betrothed girl was not required to 
 attend the funeral of her future father-in- 
 law or mother-in-law, a trying ordeal which 
 she must be glad to escape. Sometimes when 
 she does attend, she merely kneels to the 
 coffin, blit does not “ lament,” for usage is in 
 this, as in other particulars, very capricious. 
 
13 
 
 age will be hastened, in the event of a 
 death of a person belonging to an older 
 generation, even if a later date had been 
 previously set. 
 
 To a foreigner, the Chinese habit of early 
 engagements appears to have no single re- 
 deeming feature. It hampers both families, 
 with no apparent corresponding advantages, 
 if indeed there are advantages of any kind. 
 It assumes, what is far from certain, and 
 often not at all likely, that the relative 
 position of the two families will continue 
 to be the same. This assumption is con- 
 tradicted by universal experience. Time 
 and change happen to all, and the insecur- 
 ity of human afl’airs is nowhere more 
 manifest than in the tenure of Chinese pro- 
 perty. Families are going up and coming 
 down all the time. It is a well settled 
 jjrinciple in China that matches should be 
 between those who are in the same general 
 circumstances. Disregard of this rule is 
 sure to bring trouble. But if early betro- 
 thals are the practice, the chances of 
 material alteration in the condition of each 
 of the families are greatly increased. When 
 he is engaged the character of the boy, 
 upon which so much of a bride’s happiness 
 is to depend, has not perhaps been formed. 
 Even if it has been formed, it is generally 
 next to impossible for the girl’s family to 
 learn anything authentic as to what the 
 character is, though to all appearance it 
 would be so easy for them to ascertain by 
 sub-latent methods. But as a rule, it would 
 appear that they do not concern themselves 
 much about the matter after the en- 
 gagement is proposed and accepted, 
 and at no time do they give it a 
 hundredth part of the investigation which 
 it seems to us to warrant. If the boy be- 
 comes a gambler, a profligate, or dissipated 
 in any other way, there is no retreat for 
 the family of the girl, no matter to what 
 extremities they may be driven. Chinese 
 violation of the most ordinary rules of 
 prudence and common sense in the matter 
 of the betrothal of their daughters is, to a 
 westerner, previous to experience and ob- 
 servation, almost incredible. 
 
 A Chinese marriage engagement begins 
 when the red cards have been interchanged, 
 ratifying the agreement. These are in some 
 districts formidable documents, almost as 
 large as a crib-blanket, and are very im- 
 portant as evidence in case of future 
 trouble. It is very rare to hear of the 
 breaking of a marriage engagement in 
 China, though such instances do doubtless 
 occur. In a case of this sort the card of 
 the boy’s family had been delivered to the 
 other family, at which point the transaction 
 is considered to be definitely closed. But an 
 uncle of the betrothed girl, althoughyounger 
 than the father of the girl, created a dis- 
 turbance and refused to allow the engage- 
 ment to stand. This made the matter 
 very serious, but as the younger brother 
 
 was inflexible, there was no help for it 
 but to send the red acceptance card 
 back by the middleman who brought 
 it. This also was a delicate matter, but 
 a Chinese is seldom at a loss for expedients, 
 when a disagreeable thing must be done. 
 He selected a time when all the male mem- 
 bers of the boy’s family were in the wheat- 
 field, and then threw the card declining 
 the match into the yard of the family of 
 the boy, and went his way. None of the 
 women of the family could read, and it 
 was not until the men returned that it 
 was discovered what the document was. 
 The result was a law-suit of portentous 
 I proportions, in which an accusation was 
 brought against both the father of the girl 
 and against the middleman. This case 
 was finally adjusted by a money payment. 
 The delivery of the red cards is, as we 
 have remarked, the beginning of the en- 
 gagement, the culmination being the ar- 
 rival of the bride in her chair at the 
 home of her husband. The date of this 
 event is wholly dependent upon the plea- 
 sure of the boy’s family. Whatever acces- 
 sories the wedding may have, tlie arrival 
 of the bride is the de facto completion 
 of the contract. This becomes evident 
 in the case of second marriages, wliere 
 there is often, and even proverbially, no 
 ceremony of any sort which must be 
 observed. The Chinese imperial calendar 
 designates the days which are the most 
 felicitous for weddings, and it constantly 
 hapi)ens that on these particular days there 
 will be what the Chinese term “red festivi- 
 ties ” in almost every village. The same 
 bridal sedan-chair may be used many times. 
 In regions where it is the custom to have 
 all weddings in the forenoori, second mar- 
 riages are put off until the afternoon, 
 or even postponed until the evening, mark- 
 ing their minor importance. That the only 
 essoitial feature of a Chinese wedding is 
 the delivery of the bride at her husband’s 
 home, is strikingly shown in those not very 
 uncommon instances in which a Chinese is 
 married without himself being present at 
 all. It is usually considered a very ill 
 omen to change the date set for a wedding, 
 especially to postpone it. Yet it sometimes 
 happens that the young man is at a distance 
 from home, and fails to return in time. 
 Or the bridegroom may be a scliolar, and 
 find that the date of an inn^ortant examina- 
 tion coincides with the day set for his 
 wedding. In such a case he will pro- 
 bably choose “business before pleasure’’ 
 and the bride will be “taken delivery of” 
 by older members of his family, without 
 disturbing his own literary ambitions. 
 
 Of the details of Chinese weddings we 
 do not intend to speak. There are wide 
 variations of usage in almost all particulars, 
 though the general plan if? doubtless much 
 the same. The variations appertain, not to 
 the ceremonies of the wedding alone, but 
 
14 
 
 to all the proceedings from beginning to I 
 end. It is supposed that the explanation , 
 of the singular and sotuetiiiies apparently 
 unaccountable variation in these and other 
 usages, found .all over China, may be due 
 to the persistent survival of customs which 
 have been handed down from the time of 
 the Divided Kingdom. But very consider- 
 able differences in usage are to be met with 
 in regions not far apart, and which were 
 never a part of different kingdoms. Tha 
 saying runs, “ Customs vary every ten U,” 
 which seems at times to be a literal truth. 
 
 In the south of China, as we have already 
 remarked, the transfer of money at the 
 engagement of a daughter, from the parents 
 of the boy to tliose of the girl, assumes 
 for all practical purjjioses the aspect of a 
 ljurchase, which, jiure and simple, it offen 
 is. But in other parts of China we never 
 hear of such a transaction, but only of a 
 dowry from the bride’s family, niuch in the 
 manner of Western lands at times. Vast 
 sums are undoubtedly squandered by the 
 very wealthy Chinese at the weddings of 
 their daughters, and it is a common adage 
 that to such expenditures there is no limit. 
 But in weddings in the ordinary walks of 
 life, to which all but a small fraction 
 of the peojde belong, tlie impression 
 which will be made upon the obser- 
 vant foreigner will genei'ally be that 
 there is a great amount of shabby genti- 
 lity, a thin veneer of display beneath which 
 it is ea.sy to see the real texture. 'I'lie 
 bridal chair is often itself a tit emblem of 
 this truth. Looked at from a distance, it 
 appears to be of the most gorgeous descrip- 
 tion, but oil a nearer view it is frequently 
 perceived to be a most unattractive frame- 
 work covered with a gaudy set of trappings 
 sometimes much worn and evidently the 
 worse for wear. In some cases there is a 
 double framework, the outer of which can 
 be lifted entirely off, being too clumsy to be 
 carried into a courtyard. The inner chair 
 can be carried through the narrow doors of 
 any Chinese yard, or, if required, into the 
 house itself. The bride is no sooner out of 
 the chair than the process of dismantling 
 the bridal-chair begins, in the immediate j 
 sight of all the guests, and as a matter of 
 course. The Chinese is not a victim of ! 
 sentiment, and he fails to see anything ' 
 incongruous in these proceedings. It not 
 infrequently happens that the resjdendent 
 garment worn by the bride is hired for 
 the occasion, a fact of which the guests 
 present are not likely to be ignorant. We 
 once saw a garment of this sort, which the 
 bride had just taken off, delivijred to the 
 headman in charge of the bridal chair 
 and of tlie accompanjung jiarapliernalia. 
 Upon examining it, to make sure that 
 it was in as good condition as when 
 it was hired, ithis man found, or pro- i 
 fessed to lind, a grea.se-spot upon it, ' 
 which not only attracted his attention j 
 
 but excited his wrath. He began to talk 
 in loud and excited tones, waxing more 
 and more furious until the guests were all 
 called away from their other occupations to 
 listen to the dispute. Yet the foreign spec- 
 tator was probably the only person present 
 to whom it occurred that this was an un- 
 timely and unseemly proceeding, out of har- 
 mony with tlie time and the circumstances. 
 
 The arrival of a first baby is, iri the life of 
 a Chinese wife, a very different event from 
 the like occurrence in the life of a wife in 
 Occidental lands. If the child is a boy, 
 the joy of the whole household is of course 
 great, but if on the contrary it is a girl, 
 the depression of the spirits of the entire 
 establishment is equally marked. In such 
 ! a case, the young wife is often treated with 
 coldness, and not infrequently with harsh- 
 ness, even if, as sometimes happens, she is 
 not actuall}' beaten for her lack of discre- 
 tion in not producing a son. If she has 
 had several daughters in succession, espe- 
 cially if she has borne no son or none 
 which has lived, her life cannot be a 
 pleasant one. 
 
 There is a story of a certain noble Eng- 
 lisli lord, who had more daughters than 
 any other member of the aristocracy. When 
 on the Continent travelling, he walked out 
 one day with six of his daughters. Some 
 one who saw him, remarked to a com- 
 panion, ‘ ‘ Poor man. ” The noble lord over- 
 heard the observation, and turning to the 
 person who made it, replied, “ Not so 
 ‘ poor ’ as you think ; I have six more at 
 home”! It is que.stionable whether any 
 Chinese could be found who would not 
 sympathise witli the comment of the by- 
 stander, or who would agree with the rejdy 
 of the father. Indeed, we have serious 
 doubts whether, among all the innumer- 
 able myriads of this race, there ever lived 
 a Chinese who had twelve daughters living 
 at once. 
 
 It is one of the postulates of Chine.se 
 propriety that however much a wife may 
 continue to visit at the maternal home, 
 (and on this point the usages in some re- 
 gions are very liberal) her children must all 
 be born at their father’s house. This is a 
 rule of such unljending rigour that a breach 
 of it is considered a deep disgrace, and in 
 tlie effort to avoid it, women will sometimes 
 submit to extreme inconveniences, and run 
 the most serious risks, not infrequently, it 
 is said, meeting in consequence with pain- 
 ful and humiliating accidents. To the 
 Occidental question as to the reason for 
 this powerful prejudice against a confine- 
 ment at a mother’s home, the Chinese are 
 able to give no better reply than an 
 attirmation tliat if such an event should 
 Inqipen, the mother’s family may he 
 expected to become very poor. This 
 superstition is so strong that in some 
 localities, if such an event has happened, it 
 is customary for the family of the husband to 
 
15 
 
 harness a team to a plough, and, proceeding 
 to the home of the girl’s parents, plough up 
 their court-yard. The son-in-law must also 
 cook a kettle full of millet or rice for his 
 mother-in-law, by which means the dire 
 extremity of poverty may be avoided. 
 Perhaps, after all, the idea at the bottom 
 of these singular performances is merely 
 the thoroughly Chinese one that, if a 
 married daughter and her children are to 
 come upon her mother’s family for their 
 support, poverty will be the certain result, 
 a view which has in it some reason. 
 There is the highest Chinese classical au- 
 thority for the proposition that if a mother 
 is really anxious to do the best which she 
 can for her infant, although she may not 
 succeed perfectly she will not come far 
 short of success. There is equally trust- 
 worthy Occidental medical authority for 
 the statement that as applied to Chin- 
 ese women this proposition is a gross error. 
 Undoubtedly superstition directly or in- 
 directly destroys the lives of many Chinese 
 children. But this cause, which is com- 
 plex in its operations, is probably much 
 less efficient for evil than the utter lack, 
 on the part of the parents, of the instinct 
 of conformity to the most obvious of 
 Nature’s laws. Nursing children, as well 
 as those a little larger, are allowed to eat 
 almost any article of food at random, to 
 swallow pieces of raw sweet potatoes, and 
 turnips, to suck the tobacco-pipe of 
 their grandfather, aird in general to have 
 whatever they want. At the earliest age, 
 they are subjected to the most violent 
 alternations of heat and cold, are carried 
 abroad bare-headed and are often suddenly 
 chilled, sometimes fatally. A very large 
 percentage of Chinese infants must die in 
 their first year not infrequently from 
 fits, the causes of which are sufficiently 
 obvious to foreigners who know the care- 
 lessness with which Chinese children are 
 handled. We have known a Chinese 
 mother, in a moment of dissatisfaction, to 
 throw her young and naked infant out 
 of doors into a snow-bank. Another 
 cut off one of her baby’s fingeis with 
 a pair of dull shears, to save it from 
 fits, and was rewarded by seeing it die 
 in convulsions. Such a practice is said 
 to be not uncommon. “ Who would have 
 supposed that it would have done so ?” her 
 mother remarked to a foreigner. But even 
 if the young mother were endowed with 
 the best of judgment, it would still be im- 
 possible for her to secure proper care for 
 lier' children, for the reason that she is 
 herself only a “ child”* and in her manage- 
 ment of her children, as in other affairs, is 
 
 * A Chinese woman whose parents are 
 living, is constantly referred to not only as a 
 “girl,” but as an unmarried girl (ku-niang), 
 although she may be herself the mother of 
 half a dozen children. 
 
 wholly subject to the dictation of her 
 mother-in-law, as well as to the caprices of 
 a platoon of aunts, grandmothers, &c. , with 
 whom nearly all Chinese court-yards swarm. 
 
 The severe labour entailed upon Chinese 
 women in the drudgery of caring for large 
 families, assisting in gathering the crops, 
 and other outside toils, and the great drafts 
 made upon their physical vitality by bearing 
 and nursing so many children, amply suffice 
 to account for the nearly universally ob- 
 served fact that these women grow old 
 rapidly. A Chinese bride, handsome at the 
 age of eighteen, will be faded at thirty, and 
 at fifty wrinkled and ugly. 
 
 III. 
 
 The fact that Chinese girls are married 
 so young, and that they have not been 
 taught those lessons of self-control which 
 it is, so important for them to learn, suffices 
 to demonstrate the absolute necessity for 
 the existence of the Chinese mother-in-law 
 as au element in the family. A great deal is 
 heard of the tyranny and cruelty of these 
 mothers-in-law, and there is a firm basis of 
 fact for all that' is so often said ujion that 
 jioint. But it must at the same time be borne 
 in mind, that without her, the Chinese 
 family would go to utter ruin. The father-in- 
 law is not only unfitted to take the control 
 which belongs to his wife, even were he 
 at home all the time, which would seldom 
 be the case, but propriety forbids him to 
 do any such thing, even were he able. In 
 families where a mother-in-law, is lacking, 
 there are not unlikely to be much great- 
 er evils than the worst mother-in-law. 
 Abuse of the daughter-in-law is so common 
 a circumstance, that unless it be especially 
 flagrant, it attracts very little attention. 
 
 It would be wholly incorrect to represent 
 this as the normal or the inevitable condi- 
 tion to which Chinese brides are reduced, 
 but it is not too much to affirm that no 
 bride has any adequate security against 
 such abuse. It assumes all varieties of 
 forms, from incessant scolding, up to the 
 most cruel treatment. If it is carried to 
 an extreme pitch, the mother’s family will 
 interfere, not legally for that they can not 
 do, but by brute force. 'In a typical case 
 of this sort, where the daughter-in-law had 
 been repeatedly and shamefully abused by 
 the family of lier husband, which had been 
 remonstrated with in vain by the family of 
 the girl, the latter family mustered a large 
 force, went to the house of the mother-in- 
 law, destroyed the furniture, beat the 
 other family severely, and dragged the old 
 mother-in-law out into the street, where 
 she was left screaming with what strength 
 remained to her, and covered with blood, 
 in which condition she was seen by foreign- 
 ers. These proceedings are designed as a 
 practical protest against tyranny and an 
 intimation that sauce for a young goose 
 may be in like manner sauce for an older 
 
 / 
 
16 
 
 one also. One would suppose that the 
 only outcome of such a disturbance as 
 this, would be a long and bitter lawsuit, 
 wasting the property of each of the 
 parties, and perhaps reducing them to 
 ruin. But with that eminent practicality 
 which characterises the Chinese, the girl 
 was carried off to the home of her parents, 
 “peace-talkers” intervened, and the girl 
 was returned to her husband’s home upon 
 the promise of better treatment. This 
 would probably be secured, just in propor- 
 tion to the ability of the girl’s family to 
 enforce it. In another case reported to 
 the writer, similar in its nature to the one 
 just mentioned, the girl was sent to her 
 husband, after “peace-talkers” had adjusted 
 the affair, and was locked up by the mother- 
 in-law in a small room, with only one meal 
 a day. Within a year, sliehadhanged herself. 
 It is not the ignorant and the uneducated 
 only who thus take the law into their own 
 hands, on behalf of injured daughters. 
 We have heard of a case in which the 
 father of the girl who drowned herself, was 
 a literary graduate. He raised a band of 
 men, went to the home of his son-in-law, 
 pulled down the gate-house to the premises 
 and some of the buildings. In the resulting 
 law-suit he was severely reproved by the 
 district magistrate, who told him that he 
 had no right to assume to avenge his own 
 wrongs, and that he was only saved from a 
 beating in coui’t by his literary degree. 
 A still more striking example was offered 
 by an official of the third rank, whose 
 daughter’s wrongs moved him to raise an 
 armed band and make an attack upon the 
 house of the son-in-law. This proved to be 
 strong and not easily taken, upon which 
 the angry Taotai contented himself with 
 reviling the whole family at the top of 
 his voice, exectly as a coolie would have 
 done. Wrongs which can only be met 
 with such acts as this, on the part of 
 those who are the most conservative 
 members of Chinese society, must be very 
 real and very grievous. In the very nume- 
 rous cases in which a daughter-in-law is 
 driven to suicide, by the treatment which 
 she receives, tlie subsequent proceedings 
 will depend mainly upon the number and 
 .standing of her relatives. The first thing 
 is to notify the family of the deceased that 
 she has died, for without their presence 
 the funeral cannot take place, or if it should 
 take place, the body would have to be 
 exhumed, to satisfy her friends that the 
 death was a natural one, and not due to vio- 
 lence, which is always likely to be suspect- 
 ed. A Chinese in the employ of the writer, 
 was summoned one day to see his married 
 daughter in another village, who was said to 
 be not “ very well. ’ When the father ar- 
 rived, he found her hanging by her girdle 
 to a beam ! 
 
 In cases of this sort, a law-suit is excep- 
 tional. There are several powerful con- 
 
 siderations which act as deterrents from 
 such a step as sending in an accusation. It 
 is almost always next to impossible to prove 
 the case of the girl’s family, for the rea- 
 son that the opposite party can always so 
 represent the matter as to throw the blame 
 on the girl. In one such instance, the 
 husband brought into court a very small 
 woman’s shoe; explaining that he had 
 scolded his wife for wearing so small a one, 
 which unfitted her for work. He alleged 
 that she then reviled him, for which he 
 struck her (of which there were marks), 
 whereupon she drowned herself. To a 
 defence like this, it is impossible for the 
 girl’s family to make any reply whatever. 
 The accusation is not brought against 
 the husband, but against the father- 
 in-law, for practically the law does not 
 interfere between husband and wife. It is 
 only necessary for the husband to admit 
 the fact of having beaten his wife, alleging 
 as a reason that she was “ unfilial” to his 
 parents, to screen himself completely. 
 VVe have heard of a suit where in reply to 
 a claim of this sort, the brother of the gul 
 testified that she had been beaten previous 
 to the alleged “unfilial” conduct. This 
 seemed to make the magistrate angry, and he 
 ordered the brother to receive several hundr- 
 ed blows for his testimony, and decided that 
 the husband’s family should only be required 
 to provide a cheap willow-wood coffin for 
 the deceased. Another even more efficient 
 cause deterring from such law-suits, is the 
 necessity of holding an inquest over the 
 girl’s body. This is conducted with the 
 utmost publicity, upon the Oriental plan of 
 letting the public see how the matter really 
 stands. A threshing floor is turned into 
 an official arena, a set of mat-sheds are put 
 up, and the whole village soon swarms 
 with yamen-runners. The corpse of the 
 deceased is laid uncovered on a mat ex- 
 posed to the sight of every one, before and 
 during the inquest. In order to avoid the 
 shame of such exposure, the most bitter 
 enemies are often willing enough to put 
 the matter in the hands of “peace talkers.” 
 'Phese represent the village of each of the 
 principals, and they meet to agree upon 
 the terms of settlement. These terms will 
 depend altogether upon the wealth or other- 
 wise of the family of the mother-in-law. 
 If this family is a rich one, the opposite 
 party always insist upon bleedings it to the 
 utmost practicable extent. Every detail 
 of the funeral is arranged to be as expen- 
 sive to the family as pos.sible. There must 
 be a cypress-wood coffin, of a specified .size 
 and thickness, a certain variety of funeral 
 clothes, often far in excess of what the 
 'coffin could by any ijossibility contain, and 
 some of them made perhaps of silk or satin. 
 A definite amount is required to be spent in 
 hiring Buddhist or Taoist priests, or both, 
 to read masses at the funeral. It is con- 
 sidered disgraceful to compound with the 
 
17 
 
 family of the mother-in-law, by receiving 
 a money payment, instead of exacting all 
 this funeral show, but doubtless such com- 
 positions are sometimes made. As a busi- 
 ness arrangement merely, it is evidently 
 more to the interest of all parties, to pay 
 the girl’s relatives say two hundred strings 
 of cash, rather than to expend a thousand 
 strings on a funeral which can do no one 
 any good. But Chinese sensitiveness to 
 public sentiment is so extreme, that such 
 settlements for a mere transfer of cash 
 must be comparatively rare. The wedding 
 outfit of a bride is often very extensive, 
 but in case of her suicide none of it 
 goes back to her family. We have 
 heard from eye-witnesses of many cases in 
 which huge piles of clothing which had 
 been required for the funeral of such a 
 suicide from the family of the mother-in- 
 law, have been burned in a vast heap at 
 the grave. We know of one instance in 
 which all the wedding outfit, which had 
 been a large one, wardrobes, tables, mir- 
 rors, ornaments, &c., was taken out upon 
 the street and destroyed in the presence of 
 the girl’s family. The motive to this is of 
 coui’se revenge, but the ultimate effect of 
 such proceedings is to act as an imperfect 
 check upon the behaviour of the mother- 
 in-law and her family toward the daughter- 
 in-law, for whom while she lives the 
 laws of the land have no protection. 
 
 When the funeral actually takes place, 
 under conditions such as we have described, 
 there is great danger that despite the ex- 
 ertions of the ‘ ‘ peace-talkers ” from both 
 sides, the dispute may break out anew. 
 At sight of the girl’s livid face, the re- 
 sult of death by strangulation, it will 
 not be strange if, excited by the spectable, 
 her family cry out “ Let her be avenged ! 
 Let her be avenged ?” To keep the women 
 of the girl’s family quiet at such a time, is 
 beyond the power of any collection of 
 “peace-talkers,” however, numerous and 
 respectable. If the respective parties are 
 restrained from mutual reviling and from 
 a fight, the funeral is regarded as a 
 -successful one. The girl’s family complain 
 of everything, the coffin, the clothing, the 
 ornaments for the corpse, and all the ap- 
 pointments generally . But they are sooth ed 
 by the comforting reminder that the dead 
 are dead, and cannot be brought to life, 
 and also that the resources of the family of 
 the mother-in-law have been utterly ex- 
 hausted, the last acre of land mortgaged to 
 raise money for the funeral, and that they 
 are loaded besides with a mill-stone of debt. 
 
 It is an ancient observation that one half 
 the world does not know how the other half 
 lives. It is quite possible to live among 
 the Chinese for a long time without be- 
 coming practically acquainted with their 
 modes of settling those difficulties to which 
 their form of civilisation makes them 
 especially liable. 
 
 The best way to study phenomena of this 
 sort is through concrete cases. A single 
 instance, well considered in all its bearings, 
 may be a window which will let in more 
 light than a volume of abstract statements. 
 Whoever is disposed to enter into such 
 studies will find in China the material ready 
 to his hand, and it will not be strange if it 
 is forced upon his attention, whether he 
 desires to contemplate it or not, as hap- 
 pened to the writer in the following highly 
 illustrative case. Many years ago, a 
 Chinese teacher in the writer’s employ 
 had leave of absence for a definite period, 
 but when that period had expired, he 
 failed to make his appearance. This is so 
 common, or rather so almost universal an 
 occurrence in China, that it might have pas- 
 sed with but a temporary notice, but for the 
 explanation which the teacher afterwards 
 gave of his inability to return, an explana- 
 tion which appeared to be so peculiar that 
 he was requested to reduce it to the form 
 of a written statement, of which the follow- 
 ing is a synopsis. 
 
 An elder sister of the teacher was married 
 to a very poor man in a village called the 
 “ Tower of the Li Family,” an insignificant 
 hamlet consisting of only four families. 
 In a year of great famine (1878), both the 
 sister and her husband died, leaving three 
 sons, all married. Of these the second 
 died, and his widow re-married. The wife 
 of the elder nephew of the teacher also 
 died, and this nephew married for his 
 second wife a widow, who had a daughter 
 of her own, twelve years of age. This 
 widow enjoyed the not very assuring re- 
 putation of having beaten her former 
 mother-in-law, and also of having caused 
 the death of her first husband. The wife 
 of the third nephew was a quarrelsome 
 woman, and the two sisters-in-law were 
 always at sword’s points, especially as all 
 four of the adults and their four children 
 shared the house and land together. 
 
 In the month of August of that year, the 
 third nephew started for a distant market, 
 with a boat-load of water-melons. On 
 leaving, he ordered his wife to fetch his 
 winter garments, w'hich she refused to do, 
 upon which they had a fight, and he left. 
 The next day was cold and rainy. The elder 
 nephew was sitting in a neighbour’s house, 
 and heard his wife engaged in a violent 
 quarrel with her sister-in-law, but he did 
 not even rise to look into the merits of the 
 case, and no other neighbour intervened to 
 exhort to peace. The younger sister-in- 
 law left the house in a fury, and from that 
 time she disappeared. About noon her con- 
 tinued absence became alarming to the elder 
 brother, who searched for her till dark, and 
 then sent word to her mother’s family, at 
 a village called “The Little Camp”, two li 
 distant. This family, upon hearing of the 
 disappearance of their daughter, raised a 
 company of ten or a dozen persons, went 
 
18 
 
 over to the “Tower of the Li Family,” enter- 
 ed the yard, and smashed all the water-jars 
 and other pottery-ware which they could. 
 “Peace-talkers” emerged, and succeeded in 
 preventing the attacking party from enter- 
 ing the house, or the damage would have 
 been still greater. After they had gone, 
 the “Lord-of-bitterness” (i.e. the elder bro- 
 ther) begged his friends to interfere and 
 “ talk peace ”, for as he was a resident of a 
 small village, he could not for a moment 
 stand before the men of “The Little Camp,” 
 which is a large village. These latter 
 belonged to one of the numerous small 
 sects which are styled “black-doors,” or 
 secret societies. In these societies there is 
 often a class of persons called “ Seers” or 
 “ Bright-eyes ” {ming-yen), who profess to 
 be able to tell what progress the pupils have 
 made in their learning of the doctrine. 
 Sometimes, as in this instance, they also 
 undertake the functions of fortune-tellers. 
 To the Bright-eye of their sect, the Little 
 Campers applied for information as to 
 what had become of the missing woman. 
 In response they learned that she had been 
 beaten to death and buried in the yard of 
 the “Lord-of-bitterness.” Upon learning 
 this, the family of the murdered woman 
 went to every door in their village, making 
 a fc‘o Coit at each door, a common and 
 significant mode of imploring their help. 
 Thus a large force was raised, which went to 
 the “Tower of the Li Family,” armed with 
 spades to dig up the body. Warned of their 
 coming, all the male residents of this latter 
 village fled, the family of the ‘ ‘ Lord-of- 
 bitterness ” taking refuge at the village in 
 the house of the local constable, who had 
 charge of several villages. The teacher in 
 question, being a near relative of the “Lord- 
 of bitterness,” and a man of intelligence and 
 pleasant manners, was asked to look after 
 the house of his nephew, which he did. 
 Owing to his presence, and his politeness, 
 no further damage was then done to the 
 property, but the whole yard was dug over 
 to find the body. After the failure of this 
 quest, the Bright-eye modified the former 
 announcement by the revelation that the 
 body was outside the yard, but not more than 
 thirty paces distant. The search was kept 
 up with spades and picks, by day and by 
 night for a week. On one of these days, a 
 brother of the missing woman espied the 
 twelve-years-old step child of the older 
 brother, and pursued her with a manure 
 fork, so that she fled in terror to a well, 
 and would have plunged into it, had 
 not bystanders interfered to stop the pur- 
 suer. The mother thereupon attempting 
 to fly from the village in which she had 
 taken refuge, to another still more remote, 
 passed along the river bank, and sat down 
 to rest. A boy who happened to be cut- 
 ting grass in the neighbourhood, recognising 
 her, and designing to terrify her, cried out, 
 “ The people of Little Camp are after you !” 
 
 On hearing these alarming words, the 
 woman at once threw herself into the river. 
 A relative chanced to see her, and plunged 
 in after her, but being a mere youth with 
 no strength for the task, both of them 
 would have been drowned, but for the 
 friendly help of some men who were water- 
 ing a vegetable garden near by. After re- 
 peated attempts had been made by the 
 Lord-of-bittemess to get the matter ad- 
 justed, and after the other party had refused 
 to listen to any terms, the latter lodged an 
 accusation in the district magistrate’syamen. 
 The magistrate heard the case twice, but each 
 time the family of the missing women behav- 
 ed in such an unreasonable and violent 
 manner that the official dismissed their case, 
 merely ordering the local constable to enlist 
 more peace-talkers, and make the parties 
 come to some agreement. It happened 
 that about that time another case some- 
 what resembling this had occurred in that 
 neighbourhood, in which a woman was 
 suspected of having drowned herself. On 
 this account a sharp watch was kept at 
 the ferry of the district city, some 
 miles lower down the river, for any 
 floating body. About the time of the 
 Magistrate’s decision, a woman’s body ap- 
 peared abreast of the ferry and was 
 identified as that of the missing woman 
 from the Li Family Tower. The official 
 held an inquest, in which all parties made 
 diligent search for wounds, but none being 
 found, the magistrate compelled the family 
 of the woman to affix their thumb marks to 
 a paper recognising this fact. He also 
 ordered the Lord-of-bittemess to buy a 
 good coffin, clothes, and prepare other 
 appointments for a showy funeral, includ- 
 ing chanting by Buddhist priests, and to 
 have the body taken to his house. He 
 also instructed the constable once more to 
 secure peace-talkers, to arrange the details 
 and to hold the funeral. But the Little 
 Campers proved to be the most obstinate 
 of mortals, and would not only listen to no 
 reason, but drove the peace-talkers from 
 their village with reviling language, never 
 so exasperating to a Chinese as when em- 
 ployed against those who are sacrificing 
 their interests for those of the public. At 
 this juncture the husband of the drowned 
 woman returned from the water-melon 
 market, went himself to the home of his 
 late wife, and expostulated with her family 
 and also urged peace through still other 
 third parties. But the Little Campeijs 
 insisted upon funeral paraphernalia 
 which would have cost ten thousand 
 strings of cash. One more efibrt at com- 
 promise was made, by the visit of an uncle 
 of the teacher who was guarding the house 
 of the Lord-of-bitterness, to the Little 
 Campers. The latter now altered their 
 demands to a payment of eight hundred 
 strings of cash, which by much chaffering 
 was eventually reduced to four hundred. 
 
19 
 
 The Lord-of-bitterness offered two hundred 
 and fifty strings, but this was rejected with 
 disdain. Upon the failure of these numei;ous 
 negotiations, the local constable presented 
 another complaintto the magistrate, reciting 
 the facts in the repeated refusal, on the part 
 of the family of the woman, to come to any 
 terms. The magistrate, recognising the 
 case as one in which the relatives were 
 resolved to make the utmost possible capi- 
 tal out of a dead body, ordered eight men 
 from his own yamen to go on that very 
 day and attend the funeral, in order to 
 insure that there should be no breach of 
 peace. These yamen runners, after the 
 customary Chinese manner, hoped to be 
 bribed to do as they were ordered, and 
 did not go to the place at all. The Lord- 
 of-bitterness and all his neighbours con- 
 tinued in obscurity, but in the interval 
 the men from the Little Camp again 
 gathered their hosts, and made four more 
 visits to the premises at the Li Family 
 Tower, breaking everything which they 
 could lay their hands upon. The next day 
 the yamen runners arrived, and the Lord- 
 of-bitterness, now thoroughly exasperated, 
 succeeded in collecting a force of several 
 hundred men from other villages, intend- 
 ing at all hazards to hold the funeral and 
 also to have a general fight, if need arose. 
 But the men of the Little Camp failed to put 
 in an appearance at this time, and the funeral 
 accordingly took place at last. The friends of 
 the woman, however, obstinately refused to 
 consider the matter as settled, at which 
 point the curtain falls, with a plentiful 
 promise of future law-suits, fights and 
 ruin. 
 
 The reader who is sufficiently interested 
 in the inner-working of the life of the 
 Chinese to follow the tangled thread of a 
 tale like this, is rewarded by the percep- 
 tion of several important facts. It is an 
 axiom in China that the family of the 
 married daughter holds its head down, 
 while the family of the man whom she has 
 married holds its head up. But in case of the 
 violent death of the married woman, all 
 this is reversed, and by a natural process of 
 re-action the family of the married woman 
 becomes a fierce and formidable antagonist. 
 Principles such as these have but to be 
 put in issue between two large villages, or 
 families, and we have the well known clan 
 fights of southern China, in all their peren- 
 nial bitterness and intensity. One of the 
 weakest parts of the Chinese social fabric 
 is the insecurity of the life and happiness 
 of woman, but no structure is stronger than 
 its weakest part, and Chinese society is no 
 exception to this law. Every year thousands 
 upon thousands of Chinese wives commit 
 suicide, tens of thousands of other persons 
 are thereby involved in serious trouble, 
 hundreds of thousands of yet others are 
 dragged in as co-partners in the difficulty, 
 and millions of dollars are expended in 
 
 extravagant funerals and ruinous lawsuits. 
 
 And all this is the outcome of the Confucian 
 theory that a wife has no rights which a 
 husband is bound to respect. The law 
 affords her no protection while she lives, 
 and such justice as she is able with difficulty 
 to exact is strictly a post mortem conces- 
 sion. 
 
 The reality of the evils of the Chinese 
 system of marriages is evidenced by the 
 extreme expedients to which unmarried 
 girls sometimes resort, to avoid matrimony. 
 Chinese newspapers not infrequently con- 
 tain references to organised societies of 
 young maidens, who solemnly vow never 
 to wed. The most recent reference 
 of this sort which has come under our 
 observation is the following paragraph, 
 found in the translations from the Skih 
 Pao : — 
 
 SUICIDE AS A VIRTUE. /— (p) , 
 
 There is a prevailing custom in a district 
 called Sheingteh in the Canton pro- 
 
 vince, among female society to form different 
 kinds of sisterhoods such as “All pure ” sister- 
 hoods, “Never-to-be-married” sisterhoods, 
 etc. Each sisterhood consists of about ten 
 young maidens who swear vows to Heaven 
 never to get married, as they regard mar- 
 riages as something horrid, believing that 
 their married lives would be miserable and 
 unholy ; and their parents fail to prevail upon 
 them to yield. A sad case has just happened : 
 a band of young maidens ended their existence 
 in this world by drowning themselves in the 
 Dragon River, because one of them was forced 
 by her parents to be married. She was engaged 
 in her childhood before she joined this sister- 
 hood. When her parents had made all the 
 necessary arrangements for her marriage, she 
 reported the affair to the other members of her 
 sisterhood, who at once agreed to die for her 
 cause if she remained constant to her sworn 
 vows to be single and virtuous. Should she vio- 
 late the laws of the sisterhood and yield to her 
 parents, her life was to be made most unplea- 
 sant by the other members and she was to be 
 taunted as a worthless being. She consulted 
 with them as to the best mode of escaping this 
 marriage, and they all agreed to die with her, 
 if she could plan to run away from her parents 
 on the night of the marriage. As there were 
 many friends to watch her movements, it was 
 almost impossible for her to escape, so she 
 attempted her life by swallowing a gold ring, 
 but any serious consequence that might have 
 resulted was prevented by the administra- 
 tion of a powerful emetic. She was finally 
 forced and made over to the male side 
 to her great grief. According to the usual 
 custom, she was allowed to return to her 
 parents. During all this time she was plan- 
 ing a way to escape to her sisters. By 
 bribing the female servants she was taken 
 one night to her sisters under the cover of 
 darkness. The sisters at once joined with her 
 in terminating their lives by jumping into the 
 Dragon River with its swift currents, which 
 rapidly carried them off. This kind of tragedy 
 is not uncommon in this part of the land. The 
 officials have from time to time tried to check 
 
20 
 
 the formation of such sisterhoods, but all their 
 efforts were in vain. Girls must have reasons 
 of their own for establishing such societies. 
 Married life must have been proved by many 
 in that region to have been not altogether too 
 sweet. However, such wholesale suicide must 
 be prevented by law if the parents have no 
 control over their daughters. 
 
 IV. 
 
 It is well-known that Chinese law 
 recognizes seven grounds for the divorce of 
 a wife, as follows : Childlessness ; Wanton 
 conduct ; Neglect of husband’s parents ; 
 Loq uacity {to yen ) ; Thievishness ; J ealousy ; 
 Malignant disease. The requisites for a 
 Chinese wife are by no means sure to be 
 exacting. A man in the writer’s employ, 
 who was thinking of giving up his single 
 life, on being questioned, as to what sort 
 of a wife he perferred, compendiously 
 replied “ It is enough if she is neither bald 
 nor idiotic ” In a country where the avowed 
 end of marriage in to raise up a posterity 
 to burn incense at the ancestral graves, it 
 is not strange that ‘ Childlessness ’ should 
 rank first among the grounds for divorce. 
 It w'ould be an error, however, to in- 
 fer that either this, or any other of the 
 above mentioned, are the ordinary occasions 
 of divorce, simply because they are de- 
 signated in the imperial code of laws. It 
 is always difficult to arrive at just conclu- 
 sions in regard to facts of a high degree of 
 complexity, especially in regard to the 
 Chinese. But so far as we can perceive, 
 the truth appears to be that divorce in 
 China is by no means so common as might 
 be expected by one reasoning from the law 
 just quoted. Probably the most common 
 cause is adultery, for the reason that this 
 is the crime most fatal to the existence of 
 the family. But it must be distinctly 
 understood that in every case of divorce, 
 there is a factor to be taken into account, 
 which the law does not even consider. 
 This is the family of the woman, and as 
 we have seen, it is a factor of great import- 
 ance, and by no means to be disregarded. 
 It is very certain that the family of the 
 woman will resist any divorce which they 
 consider to be unjust or disgraceful, not 
 merely on account of the loss of ‘ face, ’ but 
 for another reason even more powerful. 
 In China a woman cannot return to her 
 parent’s home after an unhappy marriage, 
 as is so often done in western lands, 
 because there is no provision for her support. 
 The land is set apart for the maintenance 
 of the parents, and after that has been 
 provided for the remainder is divided 
 among the brothers. No lot or portion 
 falls to any sister, it is this which makes it 
 imperative that every woman should be mar 
 ried, that she may have some visible means 
 of support. After her parents are dead, 
 her brothers, or more certainly her bro- 
 thers’ wives, would drive her from the 
 premises, as an alien who had no business 
 
 to depend upon their family, when she 
 ‘ belongs’ to another. Under this state of 
 things, it is not very likely that a husband 
 would be allowed to divorce his wife, except 
 for a valid cause, unless there should be 
 some opportunity for her to ‘take a step,’ 
 that is to re-marry elsewhere. Next to 
 adultery, the must common cause of Chinese 
 divorce is thought to be what western laws 
 euphemistically term incompatibility, by 
 which is meant, in this case, such constant 
 domestic brawls as to make life, even to a 
 Chinese, not worth living. It is needless 
 to remark that when things have reached 
 this pitch, they must be very bad indeed. 
 Every one of the above cited causes for 
 divorce evidently afford room for the loosest 
 construction of the facts, and if the law 
 were left to its own execution, with no 
 restraint from the wife’s family, the gross- 
 est injustice might be constantly committed. 
 As it is, whatever settlement is arrived at 
 in any particular case, must be the result 
 of a compromise, in which the friends of 
 the weaker party take care to see that their 
 rights are considered. 
 
 We have repeatedly referred to the 
 imperative necessity that every Chinese 
 youth should be married. To a foreigner 
 there is a mixture of the ludicrous and the 
 pathetic, in the attitude of the average 
 parent in regard to a marriage of a son who 
 has nearly reached the age of twenty, and 
 is still single. It is a Chinese aphorism of 
 ancient times, that when sons and daugh- 
 ters are once married, “the great business of 
 life has been despatched.” Chinese parents 
 look upon the marriage of their sons, just 
 as western parents look upon the matter of 
 taking young boys out their early dresses 
 and putting them into trousers. The seri- 
 ous part of life cannot be begun until this 
 is done, and to delay it is ridiculous and 
 irrational. 
 
 Chinese parents are never willing to run 
 the risk of having the marriage of any of 
 their children, especially the sons, post- 
 poned until after the death of their parents. 
 They feel uncertain whether the children 
 already married will be willing to make 
 the proper provision for the event, or in- 
 deed that they will let it take place at all. 
 Affairs of this sort involve the partition of 
 the land, with a portion to each married 
 son, and it is not in human nature to wish 
 to multiply the sharers in a property which 
 is too often at the best wholly inadequate. 
 For this cause, every prudent parent wishes 
 to see this “main business of life,” put 
 through while he is able to superintend 
 the details. 
 
 The inexorable necessity for the mar- 
 riage of sons is not suspended by the 
 fact that the child is wholly unsuited for 
 a real marriage, or indeed incapable of it. 
 Cases constantly occur, in which a boy 
 who is a hopeless and helpless cripple, is 
 married to a girl, whose family only assent 
 
21 
 
 to the arrangement, because of the advan- 
 tageous terms which are offered. Children 
 who are subject to epileptic or otlier forms 
 of fits, those who are more or less insane, 
 and even those who are wholly idiotic, all 
 may have, and do have ‘wives’ provided only 
 that the families of the boys are in good 
 circumstances. The inevitable result of this 
 violation of the laws of nature, is an infinity 
 of suffering for the girls whose lives are thus 
 wrecked, and the evolution of a great wealth 
 of scandal. There is another feature of 
 Chinese married life, to which little atten- 
 tion seems to have been paid by foreigners, 
 but which is well worth investigation. It 
 is the kidnapping of legally married wives. 
 The method by which this may be accom- 
 plished, and the difliculty of tracking 
 those who do it, may be illustrated by 
 the following case, with the principal 
 pals in which, the father and the father-in- 
 law of the bride, the writer is acquainted, 
 having been present at the wedding in 
 December 1881. The bride herself, was, 
 as so often, a mere child. On her frequent 
 visits to her native village which local 
 custom allows, the bride did not spend 
 much of her time at her own home, where 
 she was probably not made very welcome 
 by her stepmother, but went instead to her 
 grandmother’s, who was old, half blind, 
 and ill supplied with bedding. In a neigh- 
 bouring yard lived a cousin of the girl, who 
 was a ‘ salt inspector,’ that is one whose duty 
 it is to seize dealers in smuggled salt. His 
 wife was the daughter of a widow, who 
 was reported to be herself a dealer in 
 smuggled salt, of course with the conni- 
 vance of her son-in-law. This couple were 
 said to have been married without the 
 intervention of go-betweens, and hence 
 the most flagitious conduct was to be ex- 
 pected from them. The girl got into the 
 habit, whenever she visited her village, of 
 going to the house of this cousin, and not 
 to that of her father. The cousin was 
 absent much of the time, on his business 
 in connection with the suppression (or the 
 sale) of smuggled salt. Upon one occa- 
 sion, after a ten day’s visit to her native 
 village she returned to the home of her 
 husband (also a mere child), where she 
 staid five days, and then went again to her 
 own \dllage. A younger sister-in-law, 
 sixteen years of age, went with her two 
 thirds of the way, at which point the 
 bride sent her escort back and pro- 
 ceeded along. Some days after this, 
 the own sister of the bride met the 
 father-in-law at a fair, and inquired why 
 the bride did not return to her own village 
 as agreed. Her absence from both home.s 
 was thus for the first time discovered. 
 The steps taken to follow her are an 
 excellent illustration of certain phases 
 of Chinese life. It is almost impossible 
 in China for any one to do anything 
 so secretly that some other persons do 
 
 not know of it, and in an affair so serious 
 as the disappearance outright of a young 
 bride, the chances of successful conceal- 
 ment would seem to be very slight. 
 
 The father-in-law of the girl went to the 
 I village where she had lived, and learned 
 that upon the occasion of her home visits 
 the child had been allowed to go where she 
 pleased, and that once after coming in from 
 her cousin’s, she had been heard to remark 
 that she herself was worth as much as five 
 ounces of silver. It was also reported that 
 the wife of the cousin had been observed 
 waiting for the missing girl, on the night 
 she was last seen at the time when she 
 dismissed the sister-in-law who had ac- 
 companied her. This was all the clue 
 that could be got. 
 
 The father-in-law now presented a peti- 
 tion to the district magistrate, reciting the 
 facts and accusing the girl’s father, and 
 others. This was followed by counter accu- 
 sations from the father, the cousin, and his 
 mother-in-law. The official reply to the 
 complaint was an order to the local con- 
 stable to find the girl. The constable was 
 a wholly incompetent person, and could not 
 have found her if he had tried. A second 
 petition to the magistrate was followed by 
 the same reply. This signified that there 
 was no hope from that official, who took 
 no interest in the matter. 
 
 The next stage in the proceedings was 
 to put the matter into the hands of friends, 
 begging them to undertake what the prin- 
 cipal could not do for himself. (This act is 
 expressed in Chinese by the character t‘o, 
 which means, “to engage one to do,” a 
 word for which there is no equivalent in 
 I the English language, perhaps for the 
 characteristic reason that those who made 
 the English language had never learned “to 
 engage one to do,” but when they wanted 
 anything done, did it themselves. To sim- 
 plify the narrative, and to avoid circumlocu- 
 j tions, we shall use t‘o as if it were an 
 English word). The first person whom 
 the father-in-law thought to <‘o was a 
 person named Ma, who lived in a village 
 six miles away, but it was first necessary to 
 t‘o one of the father-in-law’s townsmen to 
 get atMa, the two being distantly connected. 
 This made what theChinesecall a “circuitous 
 t‘o.” The man Ma passed on the f‘o to 
 another man, named Yii, each of them 
 having been salt inspectors in the same 
 district. Tlie man Yii was to find another 
 man named Wang, who was a person of 
 much local importance in a village not far 
 from the home of the father-in-law, for 
 no two of the persons in this circuitous 
 t’o lived in the same village. The man 
 j Yii passed on his t’o to another local bully 
 I in a village several miles distant. The man 
 Ma had another t’o to see the head ins- 
 pector of salt for the district, who is asked 
 to make an official report to the magistrate, 
 j reciting the alleged facts against the salt 
 
22 
 
 inspector, who is the girl’s cousin. This 
 was done, the cousin was summoned be- 
 fore the magistrate, who inquired if he had 
 heard of the charge, but he had not ! Was 
 the charge true 1 Oh no, wholly false. If 
 it should turn out to be true, would he 
 assume the responsibility 1 Certainly he 
 would. Upon this the inspector was dis- 
 missed, and the second stage of the pro- 
 ceedings closed with as little result as the 
 first. After these repeated failures of 
 justice, the poor father-in-law resolved to 
 make one more trial, a desperate expedient, 
 but the only one which was left. He seized 
 the occasion of the passing of the district 
 oflicial through that village, to kneel in 
 front of the sedan-chair and proclaim his 
 grievance. The magistrate merely repeated 
 what had been said in court, that he knew 
 nothing about the matter ; that it was not 
 his business to find the cattle of those who 
 might lose them, neither was it his function 
 to recover daughters-in-law. He also ex- 
 pressed the opinion that tlie father-in-law 
 was lacking in proof of his case, and was 
 falsely accusing parties who were innocent, 
 and then ordered his chair to proceed. 
 The only remaining hope of tracing the 
 missing person was to follow up chance 
 clues. For example, a man living in a 
 village near to the home of the father- 
 in-law had a daughter visiting in the 
 village in which lived the mother-in-law 
 of the obnoxious cousin. This young girl, 
 while on this visit, saw a cart drive to the 
 door of this mother-in-law. which was 
 directly opposite, and saw a girl who was 
 crying put into the cart and driven away. 
 A persistent effort to follow uiJ this story 
 resulted in nothing more than a declaration 
 that it was only the “talk of children.” A 
 visit on the part of the father-in-law to the 
 village to which the cart in question was 
 supposed to have gone, resulted in the 
 discovery of nothing. In such a case, no 
 one will give any information whatever, no 
 matter what he may know, for the reason 
 that the possible efl’ect may be to drag him 
 as witness into a fearful lawsuit, which is 
 only one step removed from being the prin- 
 cipal victim oneself. This is so universal 
 or deterrent in a quest of this sort as almost 
 to bar all progress. Those who were inter- 
 ested in this particular case were led to 
 recal another, which occurred many years 
 before in a village immediately contiguous, 
 where the wife of a man who was working 
 for some one else was taken off (of course 
 with her consent) while he was absent. In 
 this instance, although the husband was 
 able to ascertain to what village she had 
 been taken, yet as , it was a large one he 
 could never get any farther trace of her, 
 and she died there. The writer is per- 
 sonally acquainted with two families in 
 which such occurrences have taken place, 
 and with a third, the wife in which, when 
 living with her first husband who divorced 
 
 her, was to have been kidnapped, if the 
 plan could have been carried out. 
 
 Jt is of course impossible to form any 
 correct idea as to the extent to which the 
 kidnapping of married women is carried 
 in China, but there are a few little windows 
 through which glimpses may be had of re- 
 gions beyond our ordinary vision. Such 
 glimpses may be frequently gained from 
 accounts published in Chinese native news- 
 papers, in which such accounts often form 
 a staple topic. In the absence of any 
 acquaintance wdth the wider interests of 
 the empire, these piquant personalities 
 seem to many Chinese very entertaining, 
 as items of a similar sort do to certain 
 readers in Western lands. Such gossip is 
 collected at the yaraens, where many of the 
 cases reported have already reached the 
 stage of a prosecution, and others are 
 i (juietly adjusted by peace-talkers. Similar 
 information may also be obtained from 
 occasional memorials printed in the Peking 
 Gazette. It not seldom happens that these 
 kidnapping cases lead to murder, and per- 
 haps to wholesale fighting, ending in many 
 deaths, which renders it necessary for a 
 Governor to report the facts and proceedings 
 to Peking. From data of this sort one 
 would infer that, as the proverb says, ‘ ‘ the 
 crow is everywhere equally black ”. 
 
 We have spoken of the sale of girls by 
 their parents, and have now to refer to the 
 more or less common cases of the sale of 
 wives by their husbands. This is generally 
 due to the press of poverty, and the wri- 
 ter is acquainted with a Chinese who, being 
 deeply in debt, was thro^vn into prison from 
 I which he found deliverance hopeless. He 
 ; accordingly sent word to his relatives to 
 have his wife sold, which was done, and 
 ^ with the proceeds the man was able to buy 
 i his escape. The frequency of such sales 
 : may be said to bear a direct ratio to the 
 j price of grain. 
 
 There is another method of selling wives, 
 with which the Chinese are acquainted, 
 which can be adopted whenever the pres- 
 sure of life at home becomes too hard to be 
 borne. The husband and wife then start 
 off on a begging expedition toward a region 
 in which the crops have been good. In a 
 bad year, there are thousands of such per- 
 sons roaming about the country, picking up 
 a scanty subsistence wherever they can. 
 The man who wishes to sell his wife repre- 
 sents her as his sister, and declares that 
 they are forced by hunger to part company. 
 He reluctantly makes up his mind to sell 
 her to some one who is in need of a wife, 
 and who can get one more cheaply by this 
 process than by any other. To this ar- 
 rangement the woman tearfully assents, 
 the money is paid to her “ brother”, and he 
 departs, to be seen no more. After a few' 
 days or a few weeks in her new home, the 
 new'ly married “ sister ” contrives to steal 
 ! out in the evening with all of her own 
 
2d 
 
 clothes and as many more as she can col- 
 lect, and rejoins her “ brother”, setting out 
 with him for ‘‘fresh woods and pastures 
 new.” With that keen instinct for analogy 
 which characterises the Chinese, they have 
 invented for this proceeding the name of 
 “falconing with a woman,” likening it to 
 the sport of a man who places his hawk on 
 his w'rist, and releases it when lie sees 
 game in sight, only that the bird may 
 speedily return. It is a popular proverb, 
 that “ playing the falcon with a woman” im- 
 plies a plot in w'hich two persons are con- 
 cerned. 
 
 An inquirer is told that in some districts 
 this practice of “falconing” is “ exceedingly 
 common,” for the supply of gullible persons 
 who hope to buy a wife at a cheaper rate 
 than usual never fails. 
 
 V. 
 
 It is a natural sequence to the Chinese 
 doctrine of the necessity of having male 
 children that, in case this becomes unlikely, 
 a secondary wife, or concubine, should be 
 taken, with that end in view. As a matter 
 of fact, this practice is confined to a com- 
 paratively small number of families, mainly 
 those in fairly good circumstances, for no 
 others could afford the expense. The evils 
 of this expedient are well recognised, and 
 it is fortunate for Chinese society that re- 
 sort is not had to it on a much greater 
 scale than appears to be the case. The 
 practical turn of the Chinese mind has 
 suggested to them a much simpler method 
 of arriving at the intended results, by a 
 much less objectionable method. This is 
 the adoption of children from collateral 
 branches of the family, so as to keep the 
 line of succession intact and prevent the 
 extinction of any particular branch. 
 
 It not infrequently happens that the son 
 in a family dies before he is married, and 
 that it is desirable to adopt, not a son, but 
 a grandson. But there is to the Chinese 
 a kind of paradox in adopting a grandson, 
 w'hen the son has not been married. To 
 remedy this defect after the boy died 
 unmarried would, to the practical occid- 
 ental, appear impossible, but it is not so to 
 the sentimental Chinese. To meet this ex- 
 igency, they have invented the practice of 
 marrying the dead, which is certainly 
 among the most singular of the many 
 singular performances to be met with in 
 China. In order, as is said, to keep the 
 line of succession unbroken, it is thought 
 desirable that each generation should have 
 its proper representatives, whether they 
 really were or were not links in the chain. 
 It is only in families where there is some 
 considerable property that this question is 
 likely to arise. Where it does arise, and 
 where a lad has died, for whom it is thought 
 desirable to take a post-mortem wife, the 
 family cast about to hear of some young 
 girl who has also died recently. A proposi- 
 tion is then made by the usual inter- 
 
 mediaries, for the union of these two 
 corpses in the bonds of matrimony 1 It is 
 probably only poor families to which such 
 a proposition in regard to their daughter 
 would be made ; to no others would it 
 be any object. If it is accepted, there 
 is a combination of a wedding and a funeral, 
 in the process of which the deceased “bride” 
 will be taken by a large number of bearers 
 to the cemetery of the other family, and 
 laid beside her “husband”! The newly 
 adopted grandson worships the corpse of 
 his “mother”, and the other ceremonies 
 proceed in the usual way. The writer was 
 personally acquainted with a Chinese girl 
 I who after her death was thus “married ” to 
 i a dead boy in another village. Ujjon being 
 ; questioned in regard to the matter, her 
 I father admitted that it was not an entirely 
 I rational procedure, but remarked that the 
 I girl’s mother was in favour of accejiting the 
 ! offer. The real motive in this case was 
 undoubtedly a desire to have a sliowy fune- 
 , ral, at the expense of another family, for 
 : a child who was totally blind and whose 
 ; own parents were too poor at her death to 
 i do more than wrap her body in a mat. 
 
 I The practice of marrying one dead per- 
 i son to another is very far from uncommon 
 I in China. Its ultimate root is found in 
 1 the famous dictmn of Mencius, that of the 
 1 three lines of unfilial conduct the chief is 
 to leave no posterity. This utterance is 
 one upon which the whole domestic life of 
 the Chinese seems to have rested for ages. 
 It is for this reason that those Chinese who 
 I have not yet married are accounted as of 
 I no importance. When they die, if children 
 I they are “ thrown out ” either literally or 
 I figuratively, and are not allowed a place in 
 ; the family grave-yards. These belong ex- 
 clusively to those who are mated, and 
 ; occasional bachelors must expect no welcome 
 ’ there. The same principle seems to be 
 1 applicable to those who have died, and 
 whose wives have remarried. It is for such 
 cases that the strange plan of marrying a 
 ; living woman to a dead husband has been 
 1 invented. The motive on the part of the 
 i woman .could be only that of saving her- 
 ! self from starvation, a fate which often 
 ' hangs imminent over poor Chinese wi- 
 j dows who do not remarry. The motive on 
 ' the part of the family of the deceased hus- 
 ' band is to make the ancestral graves com- 
 I plete. If the family of the deceased is not 
 moderately well off, they would not go to 
 the expense and trouble of bringing in a 
 wife for a dead husband. But if she were 
 well off, the widow would probably not 
 have re-married. It thus appears that the 
 marriage of a living woman to a dead man 
 is likely to be confined to cases where, tlie 
 family being poor, the widow re-married, but 
 where the familj' circumstances having 
 subsequently materially improved, it be- 
 j came an object to arrange as already e.x- 
 1 plained to fill the threatened graveyard gap. 
 
It is perhaps for this reason that cases of I 
 such marriage appear to be relatively rare, 
 so rare indeed, that many even intelligent 
 and educated Chinese have never heard of 
 them at all, and perhaps stoutly deny their 
 existence. Sufficient inquiry, however, may 
 not improbably develop here and there 
 speciSc cases of conformity to this custom, 
 so repellent to our thought, but natural 
 and rational to the Chinese. 
 
 In cases where it has been decided to 
 adopt a son, and where there are no suitable 
 candidates within the family circle, a lad 
 may be taken from a different family, 
 sometimes related, sometimes connected, 
 sometimes neither related nor connected, 
 and sometimes he may even be a total 
 stranger merely “picked up.” The result 
 of this latter practice especially is often 
 very disappointing and painful for the 
 couple wlio have gone to so much trouble 
 to tind an heir, and who too often discover 
 tliat they have spent their strength in vain, 
 and that filial piety is not a commodity to 
 be had for the asking. But whatever 
 its attendant evils, which are undoubtedly 
 }nany and great, the Chinese plan of 
 adoption is always incomparably prefer- 
 able to that of bringing into the yard a 
 “little wife”. It is by no means singular 
 that the Chinese have given, to the relations 
 between the real wife and the supplement- 
 ary one, the significant name of “sipping 
 vinegar”. We happen to have been per- 
 sonally acquainted with only four families 
 in which a concubine had been introduced 
 In two of them, the secondary wives had 
 been bought because they were to be had 
 at a cheap rate in a year of famine. One of 
 these poor creatures came one day running 
 into the yard of a Chinese family with whom 
 the writer was living, screaming and dish- 
 evelled, as the result of “ vinegar sipping ”. 
 The man who had taken her openly 
 reviled his mother in the most shameless 
 way, upon her remonstrance at tlie act- 
 In the second instance, a man past middle 
 life thought by this means to make sure of 
 a son, but was greatly disappointed in the 
 result. He was in the habit of inviting 
 elderly Chinese women of his acquaintance 
 to go to his house, and “ exhort ” his wives 
 to stop “ .sipping vinegar”, a labour which 
 was attended with very negative results. 
 'Vhen he died, the last wife was driven out 
 to return to her relatives, although for 
 a country villager her liusband was reputed 
 to be a fairly rich man. In cases where 
 the concubine has a son, in the event of her 
 husband’s death if afl'airs are properly 
 managed she has a portion of land set 
 apart for her like any other wife. A 
 third case is reported even while these 
 lines are committed to paper. In 
 this instance a neighbour of the writer 
 and a man in middle life had a third wife, 
 about forty years of age, the proceeding 
 Avives having died, one of them leaving a 
 
 daughter now twenty years of age. 'The 
 father was absent from home much of the 
 time, engaged in business in Peking. With 
 Chinese thus situated, it often appears to 
 be a particularly happy solution of a diffi- 
 culty, to have two wives, the legal wufe at 
 home, and the “small one” at the place 
 where the husband spends most of his time. 
 When the man returned to his home, 
 several months ago, he brought this 
 secondary wife with him, an act very well 
 adapted to promote “vinegar sipping.” 
 This additional wife was a mere child, 
 much younger than the daughter of her 
 husband. At the next New Year it was 
 reported that the man Avould not alloAv his 
 proper Avife to go to the ancestral graA'es, 
 but insisted upon taking his young con- 
 cubine to do the sacrificing. Other in- 
 jurious reports, true or false, wei’e circulated 
 in regard to his behaviour toward his proper 
 wife, and his intentions in the future to 
 abandon or to divorce her, and these soon 
 reached the village of Avhich she Avas a native. 
 The result Avas a deputation of a consider- 
 able number of elderly men from that 
 village to the one in Avhich the husband 
 lived. This deputation instituted proceed- 
 ings by summoning the head of the hus- 
 band’s clan to meet them. But a large 
 number of young men, from that same vil- 
 lage, having heard of the affair, could not 
 wait for the elders to adjust the matter by 
 slow Chinese diplomacy, but came in a 
 body to the house of the husband, and 
 without any ceremony made an attack upon 
 it, breaking doAvn the barred door and 
 throAving themselves with violence upon 
 the defenceless husband. The attacking 
 party had armed themselves with awln, 
 but not, according to their own account, 
 Avith knives. It was late at night Avhen the 
 onslaught Avas made, and it Avas impossible 
 to distinguish friend from foe. The hus- 
 band Avas at once overpoAvered, and was 
 subsequently found to have seventeen aAvl- 
 stabs on his chest, and two savage knife- 
 cuts on his back, penetrating to the lungs. 
 It Avas alleged by the attacking party that 
 the latter wounds must have been made by 
 some of the man’s immediate neighbours 
 Avho Avere personal enemies and Avho, hear- 
 ing the outcry, rushed in only to find 
 I that their enemj' Avas defencele.ss, and open 
 to their attack (Avhich could not be proved 
 . against them) a circumstance of Avhich they 
 took care to avail themselves. The attacking 
 party having thus placed themselves in the 
 wrong were obliged, upon being prosecuted 
 at law, to get an influential company of 
 intermediaries to help them out of the 
 difficulty. This was at last accomplished 
 according to the usual Chinese method — a 
 1 great deal of head knocking and a great 
 ! many feasts for the injured party. Not- 
 j withstanding such instructive object-lessons 
 ! as these, Avith Avhich all parts of China 
 i must to a greater or less extent abound. 
 
25 
 
 mahy of those who think that they can 
 afford to do so, continue to repeat the 
 experiment, although the adage says : 
 “If your wife is against it, do not take 
 a concubine.” If this advice were to be 
 adopted, it is not improbable that the prac- 
 tice of concubinage in China would become 
 practically extinct. 
 
 A traveller through China often notices 
 in the villages along his route that in the 
 early morning most of the men seem to be 
 assembled by the roadside, each one squat- 
 ting in front of his own door, all busily 
 engaged in shovelling in their food with 
 chopsticks (appropriately called “ nimble- 
 sons ”) chatting meantime during the brief 
 intervals with the neighbour nearest. That 
 the entire family should sit down to a table, 
 eating together and waiting for one another, 
 after the manner of the inhabitants of some 
 countries of which we have heard, is an idea 
 so foreign to the ordinary Chinese mind as j 
 to be almost incomprehensible. This Chi- 
 nese (and oriental) habit is at once typical 
 and suggestive. It marks a wholly different 
 conception of the family, and of the position 
 of woman therein, from that to which we 
 are accustomed. It indicates the view that 
 while man is yaiig, the male, ruling, and 
 chief element in the universe, woman is 
 yin, “dull, female, inferior.” The concep- 
 tion of woman as man’s companion is in 
 China almost totally lacking, for woman is 
 not the companion of man, and with 
 society on its present terms she never can 
 be. A new bride introduced into a family 
 has visible relations with no one less than 
 with her “husband.” He would be a- 
 shamed to be seen talking with her, and in 
 general they seem in that line to have very 
 little to be ashamed of. In those unique 
 instances in which the young couple have 
 the good sense to get acquainted with each 
 other, and present the appearance of actu- 
 ally exchanging ideas, this circumstance is 
 the joke of the whole family circle, and an 
 insoluble enigma to all its members. A 
 Chinese bride has no rational prospect of 
 happiness in her new home, though she may 
 be well dressed, well fed, and perhaps not 
 abused. She must expect chronic repres- 
 sion through the long years during which 
 she is for a time in fact, and in theory 
 always, a “child.” Such rigorous discipline 
 may be necessary to fit her for the duties 
 of her position, when she shall have be- 
 come herself a mother-in-law, and at 
 the head of a company of daughters-in-law, 
 but it is a hard necessity. That there are 
 sometimes genuine attachments between 
 mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law it 
 would be a mistake to deny, for in such 
 rare cases human nature shows its power of 
 rising superior to the conventional trammels 
 in which it finds itself by iron customs 
 bound. 
 
 To defend herself against the fearful odds 
 which are often pitted against her, a Chinese 
 
 wife has but two resources. One of them 
 is her mother’s family, which, as we have 
 seen, has no real power, and is too often to 
 be compared to the stern light of a ship, 
 of no service for protection in advance, and 
 only throwing a lurid glare on the course 
 which has been passed over, but which 
 can not be retraced. The other means of 
 defence which a Chinese wife has at her 
 command is herself. If she is gifted 
 with a fluent tongue, especially if it is 
 backed by some of that hard common sense 
 which so many Chinese exhibit, it must be a 
 very peculiar household in which she does 
 not hold her own. Real ability will 
 assert itself, and such light as a Chinese 
 woman possesses will assuredly permeate 
 every corner of the domestic bushel under 
 which it is of necessity hidden. If a Chinese 
 wife has a violent temper, if she is able 
 at a moment’s notice to raise a tornado 
 I about next to nothing, and to keep it 
 for an indefined period blowing at the rate 
 of a hundred miles an hour, the position 
 of such a woman is almost certainly secure. 
 The most termagant of mothers-in-law 
 hesitates to attack a daughter-in-law who 
 has no fear of men or of demons, and who 
 is fully equal to any emergency. A Chinese 
 woman in a fury is a spectacle by no means 
 uncommon. But during the time of the 
 most violent paroxysms of fury, Vesuvius 
 itself is not more unmanageable by man. 
 If a Chinese husband happens to be a person 
 of a quiet habit, with no taste for tumults, 
 he may possibly find himself yoked to a 
 Xantippe who never for an instant re- 
 laxes the reins of her dominion. In such 
 cases the prudent man will be glad to pur- 
 chase “peace at any price,” and whatever 
 the theory may be, the woman rules. Such 
 instances are by no means infrequent. 
 This is witnessed as well by what one sees 
 and hears in Chinese society as well as by 
 the many sayings which refer to the “ man- 
 who-fears-what-is-inside,” thatis, the “hen- 
 pecked man.” Although it is an accepted 
 adage that 
 
 “ A genuine cat will slay a mouse, 
 
 “ A genuine man will rule his house,” 
 
 yet there are numerous references to the 
 punishment of “ kneeling-by-the-bedside- 
 1 holding-a-lamp-on-the-head,” which is the 
 penalty exacted by the regnant wife from 
 her disobedient husband. 
 
 If a Chinese woman has the heaven- 
 bestowed gift of being obstreperous to such 
 a decree that, as the sayings go, ‘ ‘ people 
 do not know east from west that “ men 
 are worn out and horses exhausted that 
 “the mountains tremble and the earth 
 shakes ”, this is unquestionably her surest 
 life-preserver. It is analogous to the South 
 American toucan, which frightens away 
 enemies by its mere exhibition, they not 
 caring to wait for further and detailed 
 proofs of its capacities of execution. But 
 if Buch an endowment has been denied her, 
 
^6 
 
 IVer next b'est tesobrce is tb pursue a course 
 exactly the opposite, iii all circumstances 
 and under all provocations holding her 
 tongue. To most Chinese women, this seems 
 to be a feat as difficult as aerial navigation, 
 but now ahd then an isolated case shows 
 that the difficult is not always the impossi- 
 ble. 
 
 We must regard the J>osition of women, 
 Und especially of wives, ih China as the 
 Ultimate outcome and most characteristic 
 fruitage of the Confuciaii system. In our 
 view it has been a bitter fruit, and in 
 recapitulating we wish to lay especial 
 emphasis upon the Seven Deadly Sins of 
 Confucianism in its relation to women. 
 
 I. — It provides them with no education. 
 Their minds are left in a state of nature, 
 until millions of them are led to suppose 
 that they have no minds at all, an opinion 
 which their husbands often do much to 
 confirm, and upon which they habitually act. 
 
 II. — The sale of wives and daughters. 
 This comes about so naturally, and it might 
 almost be said so inevitably, when certain 
 conditions prevail, that it is taken by the 
 Chinese as a matter of course. Except in 
 years of famine it appears in some ])arts 
 of the empire to be rare, but in other 
 parts it is the constant and the normal 
 state of things for daughters to be as really 
 sold as are horses and cattle. 
 
 III. — Too early and too universal mar- 
 riages. A considerable part of the unhap- 
 piness caused by Chinese marriages may 
 fairly be charged to the immaturity of the 
 victims. To treat children as if they were 
 adults, while at the same time treating 
 them as children who require the same 
 watch and ward as other children, does 
 not appear to be a rational procedure, nor 
 can it be claimed that it is justified by its 
 result.4 That a new i)air constitute a dis- | 
 tict entity, to be dealt with independently, > 
 is a proposition which Confucianism treats 
 with .scorn, if indeed it ever entertains 
 such a conception at all. The compul- 
 sory marriage of all girls forces all Chinese 
 society into cast-iron grooves, and leaves 
 no room for exceptional individual develop- 
 ment. It throws suspicion around every 
 isolated struggle against this galling bond- 
 age, and makes the unmarried woman seem 
 
 a personified violation of the decrees of 
 Heaven and of the laws of man. 
 
 IV. — Infanticide of female infants. This 
 is a direct, if not a legitimate result of 
 the tenet that male children are absolutely 
 indispensable, applied in a social system 
 where dire poverty is the rule, and 
 where an additional mouth frequently 
 means impending starvation. In a cha pter 
 injier “ Pagoda Shaduvra ” on “The extent 
 of a Great Crime” Miss Fielde combines a 
 great variety of testimony taken from 
 several different provinces, in the following 
 })aragraph. ‘ T find that a hundred and sixty 
 Chinese women, all over fifty years of age, 
 
 had borne six hundred and thirty-one sons, 
 and five hundred and thirty-eight daughters. 
 Of the sons, three hundred and sixty-six, 
 or nearly sixty per cent, had lived more 
 than ten years ; while of the daughters 
 only two hundred and five, or thirty-eight 
 per cent, had lived ten years. The hun- 
 dred and sixty women, according to their 
 own statements, had destroyed a hundred 
 and fifty eight of their daughters ; but none 
 had ever destroyed a boy. As only four 
 women had reared more than three girls, 
 the probability is that the number of in- 
 fanticides confessed to is considerably be- 
 low the truth. I have occasionally been 
 told by a woman that she had forgotten 
 just how many girls she had had, more 
 than she wanted. The greatest number of 
 infanticides owned to by any one woman 
 is eleven.” 
 
 Infanticide will never cease in China, 
 until the notion that the dead are depend- 
 ent for their happiness upon sacrifices 
 offered to them by the living shall have 
 been totally overthrown. 
 
 V. — ^'ccondary wives. Concubinage is 
 the natural result of the Confucian theory 
 of ancestral worship. The misery which 
 it has caused and still causes in China is 
 beyond comprehension. Nothing can up- 
 root it but a decay of faith in the assump- 
 tion underlying all forms of worship of the 
 dead. . 
 
 ■"-■‘ ’VI. — Suic ides of wives and dau^ters. 
 The preceding causes, operating singly 
 and in combination, are wholly sufficient 
 to account for the number of suicides among 
 Chinese women. The wonder rather is 
 that there are not more. But whoever un- 
 dertakes to collect facts on this subject for 
 any given district will not improbably be 
 greatly surjirised at the extraordinary 
 
 I prevalence of this practice. It is even 
 
 I adopted by children, and for causes relati- 
 vely trifling. At times it appears to 
 spread, like the small pox, and the thirst 
 for suicide becomes virtually an ejii- 
 demic. According to the native news- 
 jiapers, there are parts of China in 
 which young girls band themselves into a 
 secret league to commit suicide within a 
 certain time after they have been betrothed 
 or married. The wretchedness of the lives 
 to which they are condemned is thoroughly 
 appreciated in advance, and fate is thus 
 effectually checkmated. It would be wrong 
 to overstate the evils suffered by woman in 
 China, evils which have indeed many alle- 
 viations, and which are not to be compared 
 to those of her sisters in India or in Turkey. 
 But after all abatements have been made 
 it remains true that the death-roll o f sui- 
 pides is the most convincing proof of the 
 jvoes e iidured by Chinese women. , - 
 
 \ 11. — Overpopulation. The whole Chi- 
 nese race, is and always has been given up 
 with a single devotion to the task of raising 
 up a posterity, to do for the fathers what 
 
27 
 
 the fathers have done for the grandfathers. 
 In this particular line, they have realised 
 Wesley’s conception of the ideal church in 
 its line, where as he remarked the members 
 are ‘All at it, and always at it.’ War, 
 famine, pestilence sweep off scores of 
 millions of the population, but a few 
 decades of peace seem to repair the 
 ravages of the past, which are lost to 
 sight, like battle-fields covered with wide 
 areas of waving grain. However much 
 we may admire the recuperative power of 
 the Chinese people as a whole, and indivi- 
 dually, it is impossible not to feel righteous 
 indignation toward a system which violates 
 those beneficent laws of nature, which 
 would mercifully put an end to many 
 branches of families when such branches 
 are unfitted to survive. It is impossible to 
 contemplate with equanimity the deliberate, 
 persistent, and uniform propagation of 
 poverty, vice, disease and crime, which 
 ought rather to be surrounded with every 
 restriction to prevent its multiplication, 
 and to see this propagation of evil and 
 misery done, too, with an air of virtue, as 
 if this were of itself a kind of religion, 
 often indeed the only form of religion in 
 which the Chinese take any vital interest. 
 
 It is this system which loads down the 
 rising generation with the responsibility 
 for feeding and clothing tens of thousands 
 of human beings who ought never to have 
 been born, and whose existence can never 
 be other than a burden to themselves, a 
 period of incessant struggle without respite 
 and without hope. 
 
 To the intelligent foreigner, the most 
 prominent fact in China is the poverty of 
 its people. There are too many villages to 
 the square mile, too many families to the 
 village, too many ‘ mouths ’ to the family. 
 Wherever one goes, it is the same weary 
 tale with interminable reiteration. Poverty, 
 poverty, poverty, always and evermore 
 poverty. The empire is broad, its unoc- 
 cupied regions are extensive, and its un- 
 developed resources undoubtedly vast. But 
 in what way can these resources be so devel- 
 oped as to benefit the great mass of the 
 Chinese people ? By none, with which we are 
 
 acquainted, or of which we can conceive, 
 without a radical disturbance of the exist- 
 ing conditions. The seething mass of over- 
 population, must be drawn off to the regions 
 where it is needed, and then only will there 
 be room for the relief of those who remain. 
 It is impossible to do anything for people 
 who are wedged together after the manner 
 of matches in a box. Imagine a surgeon 
 making the attempt to set the broken leg 
 of a man in an omnibus in motion, which at 
 the time contained twenty other people, 
 most of whom also had broken legs which 
 likewise require setting ! The first thing to 
 do would be to get them all unloaded, and 
 to put them where they could be properly 
 treated, with room for the treatment, and 
 space for breathing. It is, we repeat, not 
 easy to perceive how even the most advanced 
 political economy can do anytliing of jierma- 
 iient benefit for the great mass of the Chinese 
 without a redistribution of the suiqjlus 
 population. But at this point practical 
 Confucianism intervenes, and having indeed 
 the begetting of this swarm of human 
 beings, it declares that they must not 
 abandon the graves of their ancestors, who 
 require their sacrifices, but must in the 
 same spot continue to propagate a number 
 their posterity to continue the interminable 
 process. 
 
 The world is still large, and it has, and 
 for ages will doubtless continue to have, 
 ample room for all the additional millions 
 which its existing millions can produce. 
 The world w'as never so much in need of 
 the Chinese as to-day, and never, on the 
 other hand, were the Chinese more in need 
 of the world. But if China is to hold its 
 own, much more if it is to advance as 
 other nations have advanced, and do 
 advance, it must be done under the 
 head of new forces. Confucianism has 
 been a mighty power to build up, and to 
 conserve. But Confucianism with its great 
 merits has committed many ‘Deadly Sins,’ 
 and of those sins it must ultimately suffer 
 the penalty. Confucianism as a developing 
 force is a force which is spent. Sooner or 
 later it must give way to something stron- 
 ger, wdser, and better. 
 
Mti: 
 
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