e able to show is that
infanticide is not more prevalent in China than in the Christian
communities of the West.

Let me begin by urging, what no one who has lived in China will deny,
that Chinese parents seem to be excessively fond of all their children,
male and female. A son is often spoken of playfully as a little dog,--a
puppy, in fact; a girl is often spoken of as "a thousand ounces of
gold," a jewel, and so forth. Sons are no doubt preferred; but is that
feeling peculiar to the Chinese?

A great deal too much has been made of a passage in the _Odes_, which
says that baby-sons should have sceptres to play with, while
baby-daughters should have tiles.

The allotment of these toys is not quite so disparaging as it seems. The
sceptre is indeed the symbol of rule; but the tile too has an honourable
signification, a tile being used in ancient China as a weight for the
spindle,--and consequently as a symbol of woman's work in the household.

Then, again, even a girl has a market value. Some will buy and rear them
to be servants; others, to be wives for their sons; while native
foundling hospitals, endowed by charitable Chinese, will actually pay a
small fee for every girl handed over them.

It is also curious to note how recent careful observers have several
times stated that they can find no trace of infanticide in their own
immediate districts, though they hear that it is extensively practised
in some other, generally distant, parts of the country.

After all, it is really a question which can be decided inferentially by
statistics.

Every Chinese youth, when he reaches the age of eighteen, has a sacred
duty to perform: he must marry. Broadly speaking, every adult Chinaman
in the Empire has a wife; well-to-do merchants, mandarins, and others
have subordinate wives, two, three, and even four. The Emperor has
seventy-two. This being the case, and granting also a widespread
destruction of female children, it must follow that girls are born in an
overwhelmingly large proportion to boys, utterly unheard-of in any other
part of the world.

Are, then, Chinese women the down-trodden, degraded creatures we used to
imagine Moslem women to be?

I think this question must be answered in the negative. The young
Chinese woman in a well-to-do establishment is indeed secluded, in the
sense that her circle is limited to the family and to mends of the same
sex.

From time immemorial it has been the rule in China that men a