s unfitness for citizenship.

What reason have Canadians to point the finger of reproach at the
institution of the child wife, when the age of marriage in one province
is low as twelve? And that brings up the whole question of the child
wife. Because one province has the marriage age criminally low does not
prove that that province approves of marriages at twelve. In the whole
history of that province marriages at that age have been as rare as the
pastime of skinning a man alive, and that province has no specific law
against skinning a man alive. It has no such law because that type of
crime is unknown. But can it be said that the institution of child
marriage is an unknown or even a rare crime in India? The Hindu wives
for whom loud outcry is being made are little girls barely eight years of
age, whom before marriage the husbands have never seen, men of
thirty-five and forty and forty-eight. Does Canada desire the system of
the child wife embodied in her national life? Suppose one hundred
thousand Hindu colonists came to the vacant arable lands of British
Columbia. As the inalienable right of a British subject, the colonist
must be allowed to bring in his wife. What if she is a child to whom he
was married in her infancy? The colonist being a British subject is to
be given a vote. How would Canada abolish the child wife system if Hindu
votes outnumbered Canadian votes? Forget all about the rifle fund--the
discovery of which was paid for in Hopkinson's life! Forget all about
labor and mill owner and color of pigments! You know now why the
Oriental question is more than skin-deep. Go a little deeper in this
child-wife thing! Don't balk at the horror of it! The Pacific Coast
wants you to know a few medical facts. Hundreds of thousands of children
in India, age from nine to twelve, are wives actually living with
husbands; and the husbands are in many cases from thirty to eighty years
of age. Anglo-Saxons regard these unions as criminal. One-third of all
children born of mothers under sixteen years of age die in infancy
because of the tortures to the mother's body, compared to which the
tortures of the Inquisition were merciful. Does Canada want that system
embodied in her national life? Under Canadian law such crimes are
treated to thirty-nine lashes: under American law to Judge Lynch.
Twenty-five per cent. of the women of India die prematurely because of
the crimes perpetrated through child marriage.