stands the charge of
female infanticide, now happily, though still slowly, fading from
the calculations of those who seek the truth. Fifty years ago it was
generally believed that the Chinese hated their female children, and got
rid of them in early infancy by wholesale murder. It may be admitted
at once that boys are preferred to girls, inasmuch as they carry on
the family line, and see that the worship of ancestors is regularly
performed in due season. Also, because girls require dowries, which they
take away with them for the benefit of other families than their own;
hence the saying, "There is no thief like a family of five daughters,"
and the term "lose-money goods," as jestingly applied to girls, against
which may be set another term, "a thousand ounces of gold," which is
commonly used of a daughter. Of course it is the boy who is specially
wanted in a family; and little boys are often dressed as little girls,
in order to deceive the angels of disease and death, who, it is hoped,
may thus pass them over as of less account.

To return to the belief formerly held that female infanticide was
rampant all over China. The next step was for the honest observer to
admit that it was not known in his own particular district, but to
declare that it was largely practised elsewhere. This view, however,
lost its validity when residents "elsewhere" had to allow that no
traces of infanticide could be found in their neighbourhood; and so
on. Luckily, still greater comfort is to be found in the following
argument,--a rare example of proving a negative--from which it will
be readily seen that female infanticide on any abnormal scale is
quite beyond the bounds of the possible. Those who have even a bowing
acquaintance with Chinese social life will grant that every boy, at
about the age of eighteen, is provided by his parents with a wife. They
must also concede the notorious fact that many well-to-do Chinese take
one or more concubines. The Emperor, indeed, is allowed seventy; but
this number exists only on paper as a regulation maximum. Now, if every
Chinaman has one wife, and many have two, over and above the host of
girls said to be annually sacrificed as worthless babies, it must follow
that the proportion of girls born in China enormously outnumbers the
proportion of boys, whereas in the rest of the world boys are well known
to be always in the majority. After this, it is perhaps superfluous to
state that, apart from the natural