Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/77

Rh families, however, the wives are said to live in happiness and harmony, and it has been the writer's privilege to know a Chinese Christian lady who showed the greatest kindness to the wives whom her Confucian husband had brought home, although his conduct had almost broken her heart.

On the whole, Chinese women are raising their voices against polygamy, as are the modern educated young men. It is difficult to see how a radical change can be effected very rapidly without entailing great suffering on helpless women, for the organization of a government may be changed quickly, but not that of domestic life. With the greater education of women which will make them to a certain extent economically independent, and with the example of western life, which every year is making more impression on the people, we may confidently expect the ultimate decision of this oriental people will be in favor of monogamy. It is needless to say that Christianity will teach this, as the missionaries are committed to an uncompromising opposition to all secondary marriages.

As everywhere, perhaps, the great middle class are the happiest in their domestic relations. The husband is too poor to buy other wives and maintain them, so that a male child is often adopted, from the clan if possible, to carry on the ancestor worship and perpetuate the name. The wife among the very poor may be sold as a slave and the money taken to buy another wife. If left a widow without grown sons, she may be sold as a wife again by her husband's relatives before the grass has grown green on his grave. Nowadays, there is a law to prevent a woman's being sold against her will, but often among the poor there is no alternative.

But the burden of all China's poverty seems to me to rest most heavily on the young girl. As an infant, if there are too many mouths to feed, her life is snuffed out in its first hours. In times of poverty and stress of famine, the first resort is to sell the little girls. If not as a wife, then as a slave or concubine. It does not require much imagination to picture what a little slave girl may suffer if her owners are unkind and she is sold about from one to another. On the other hand, she may come into a good family and occupy a useful and honorable position. There is a law that no maid slave shall be denied the right of marriage, and if she is attractive it may be to one of the men of the family. If the little girl is sold as a child wife, her lot may be very unhappy, for her mother-in-law is likely to make her the drudge of the family, and her husband, if he feels any affection, is never supposed to interfere in her behalf, as that only makes matters worse. The birth of a son is the great alleviating factor, for then a woman has performed the chief function in life.

One is not to suppose that the evils here mentioned, such as infanticide and girl slavery, denote any particular cruelty of nature on the