Page:Leaves from my Chinese Scrapbook - Balfour, 1887.djvu/73

 . The highest and most cultured man in China may thus be legally at the disposal of an unlettered and narrow-minded boor, if it happens that his father was born and has remained a peasant, and he himself has risen. The ethical works of China teem with admonitions to children how to perform their duty to their parents, but there is scarcely one that touches upon the duty that parents owe their children. It is not too much to say that a Chinese father has more absolute power over the members of his family than the Emperor has over his realm. Only last year the Peking Gazette recorded the horrible fact of a mother burying her own child alive, and the Emperor condoning, even if not actually approving, the loathsome crime. Had that son, even by accident or in a fit of lunacy, caused the death of the virago, he would have been slowly sliced to death and the flesh peeled off his bones. Some time after this, an unhappy woman, in trying to save herself from outrage at the hands of her father-in-law, killed him; and instead of being commended for her virtue, was condemned to death by the slicing process. Such is the doctrine of filial piety in China, so much cried up by those who have never studied it. When Voltaire adopted as the motto of his life the stirring war-cry, "Ecrasez l'Infâme" what was that Infamous he sought to crush? It was the vile and intolerant spirit that hated, persecuted, tortured, and did to death all who took the liberty of thinking for themselves. That spirit exists still, and everywhere, though in a different form. It is that which gives the license or affords an excuse for all cruelty and rank injustice, and we deliberately affirm that there is no cruelty or injustice ever perpetrated in China grosser than