Page:The evolution of marriage and of the family ... (IA evolutionofmarri00letorich).pdf/259

 spontaneously quit her husband; but this is not so simple a matter, because she represents a value. It is a capital that has fled; therefore the parents must send her back four times following to the husband-proprietor. If the latter persists in not receiving her, the marriage is dissolved, but in that case the parents must restore a part of the cattle previously paid by the marital purchaser. In short, repudiation and divorce are considered in Mongolia entirely as commercial transactions, and always arranged for the advantage of the husband.

The Chinese have regulated this still quite primitive divorce, and while leaving to the husband the right of repudiation, they have carefully specified the conditions of it.

A Chinese husband can repudiate his wife for adultery, sterility, immodesty, disobedience to her father and mother or to him, loquacity or propensity to slander, inclination to theft, a jealous disposition, or an incurable malady. These motives, however, no longer suffice when the wife has worn mourning for her father-in-law or her mother-in-law; when the family has become rich in comparison with its former poverty; and lastly, when the wife has no longer a father or mother to receive her. If, heedless of these interdictions, the husband repudiates his wife all the same, he becomes liable to receive eighty strokes of bamboo, and must take her back. To the husband alone belongs the right of repudiation, but the law admits divorce by mutual consent. On the other hand, it has taken good care to consecrate the servitude of the wife by ordering that if she flees from the conjugal abode when the husband refuses a divorce, she shall be punished by a hundred strokes of bamboo, and may be sold by her husband to any one willing to marry her. Chinese legislation absolutely refuses the "right of insurrection" to the wife, which the Kabyle Kanouns, rigorous as they are to women, have granted. For divorce, as for everything else, China is at the stage of mitigated or humane barbarism. The foundation of her laws has remained savage, but a less ancient spirit has attempted to modify their severity. It has limited the right of repudiation,