As I have said more than once, it seems to me the most intolerable
thing in life would be to be a Chinese woman. I remember when first I
began to write about China I asked a friend of mine to look over my
work and he objected to my making such a fuss about the condition of the
women.
“Why, people will think you are a suffragette!” said he, searching for
some term of obloquy that he felt could not possibly apply to me.
But I am a suffragist, an ardent suffragist, realising that a woman
is most valuable neither as an angel nor as a slave, but as a useful
citizen, and I saw then that he possibly knew little about the condition
of his own women, and probably absolutely nothing at all about the
condition of the women of the race who swarmed around him. Those he met
would be dumb, and at any rate no right-minded woman begins upon her
wrongs to a stranger. In any country it would be bad taste, in China no
words can tell what shocking bad taste. I had to seek further afield for
my information, and I got it from the medical missions. Now I went to
China with a strong prejudice against missionaries, and I found there
many people who backed me up. And then it occurred to me that I had
better go to a mission station and see what manner of people were these
I was judging so hastily and so finally.
I went. And what I saw made me sorry that Great Britain and America, to
say nothing of Scandinavia, should be deprived of the services of these
men and women who are giving so much to an alien people. Of course I
know that many missionaries have the “call,” a “vocation” I suppose the
Catholics would call it.
“It is a fine work,” said I, usually the unadmiring, “to teach these
women, but I do not like coming in contact with them, however much I
appreciate their virtues.”
And the missionary girl looked at me pityingly.
“Do you think,” said she, “we could come all this way to teach Chinese
women reading, writing and arithmetic?”
It seems to me a great thing to do; if it be only to teach them to wash,
it is a great thing; but I who merely pitied would never have stayed
there to better the condition of those unhappy women. To her and her
comrades had come that mysterious call that comes to all peoples through
all the ages, the Crying in the Wilderness, “Prepare ye the way of the
Lord. Make His paths straight,” and she thought more, far more, of it
than I did of the undoubtedly good work I saw she was doing, saw as
I never should have seen had I not gone in the ways untrodden by the
tourist, or indeed by any white man.
There are missionaries and missionaries, of course; there are even
backsliders who, having learned the difficult tongue under the ægis of
the missions, have taken up curio-buying or any other of the mercantile
careers that loom so temptingly before the man who knows China; but in
all classes of society there are backsliders, the great majority must
not be judged by them. Neither must their narrowness be laid too mueh
to heart when judging the missionary as a whole. Possibly only a fanatic
can carry through whole-heartedly the work of a missionary at a remote
station in China, and most fanatics are narrow. There are, too, the men
and women who make it a business and a livelihood, who reckon they have
house and income and position and servants in return for their services
to the heathen, but they too are faithful and carry out their contracts.
Having once seen the misery and poverty in which the great majority of
Chinese dwell, I can say honestly that I think every mission station
that I have seen is a centre from which radiates at least a hope of
better things. They raise the standard of living, and though I care
not what god a man worships, and cannot understand how any man can be
brought to care, it is good that to these people sitting in darkness
someone should point out that behind the world lies a great Force, God,
Love, call it what you will, that is working for good. That the more
educated Chinese has worked out a faith for himself, just as many in
the West have done, I grant you, but still the majority of the people
that I have seen sit in darkness and want help. From the missions they
get it. Taken by and large, the Chinaman is a utilitarian person, and if
the missions had not been helpful they would long ago have gone. And for
the missionaries themselves--I speak of those in the outstations--not
one, it seems to me, not one would stay among the Chinese unless he were
sure that his God had sent him, for the life is hard, even for the rich
missions there are many deprivations, and if therefore, being but human,
they sometimes depict their God as merciful and loving in a way that
seems small and petty, much must be forgiven them. They are doing their
best.
There is another side to it too for the West. These missionaries
are conquering China by the system of peaceful penetration. They are
persecuted, they suffer, are murdered often, but that does not drive
them away. They come back again and again, and wherever the missionary
succeeds in planting his foot the hatred to foreigners and things
foreign, strong among the conservative Chinese, is weakened and finally
broken down. China is a rich country, she is invaluable to the nations
of the earth for purposes of trade, and though the missionary in many
ways, if he were asked, would oppose the coming of the white man, he
certainly is the pioneer.
China is trying to reform herself, but the process is slow, and it seems
to me in Shansi and in the parts of Chihli that I know it would be a
long, long while before the good percolated to the proletariat, the
Babylonish slaves, if it were not for the missionaries; and particularly
do I admire the medical missionaries, for China is one huge sore.
That is the word the woman doctor at Pao Ting Fu applied to it, and,
attending her clinic of a morning, I was inclined to agree with her.
Life is hard for everybody among the poor in China, but especially does
it press upon the women. They came there into the clean sun-lit room and
the reek of them went up to heaven--bald-headed, toothless old crones in
wadded coats out of which all semblance of colour had long since passed,
young girls and little children clad in the oldest of garments. There
were so many with ingrowing eyelashes that the doctor had one particular
day upon which she operated for this painful disfigurement, and she
showed me how, by making a little nick--I'm afraid I can't use proper
surgical terms--in the upper eyelid, she turned back the eyelashes and
made them grow in the direction they are intended to grow, and saved the
unfortunates' eyes. Why eyelashes should grow in in China I don't know.
Perhaps it is my ignorance, but I have never heard of their behaving in
such an unnatural fashion in any other part of the world, while in Pao
Ting Fu this ailment seemed to be as common as influenza in London. Then
there would be women with their mouths closed by sores, often so badly
they could only live by suction, and more than once a new mouth had to
be cut; there were cancerous growths--the woman depicted in the picture
had waited twenty years before she could arrange to come under one
hundred miles to the doctor--there were sores on the head, sores all
over the body, all, I suppose, including the ingrowing eyelashes, caused
by malnutrition, swollen glands, abscesses offensive and purulent, in
fact in that clinic were collected such an array of human woes, ghastly,
horrible, as well might make one wonder if the force behind all life
could possibly be anything but devilish and cruel. Wherein could the
good be found? Where?
And yet there was good. Among these women moved the nurses. They were
comely girls in blue coats and trousers, with their abundant black hair
smoothly drawn back, neat white stockings and the daintiest of little
shoes. Their delicate artistic hands used sponge and basin very capably,
they were the greatest contrast to their patients, and yet they were
truly Chinese, had sprung from the people to whom they now ministered,
and one of them, though it was hardly observable, had an artificial
foot. So had she suffered from foot-binding that her own had had to be
amputated.
Probably most of the ailments there treated were preventable, but worst
of all were the bound feet and the ailments the women suffered from in
consequence. It is not good manners to speak about a woman's feet,
and the women themselves rarely refer to them, but naturally I was
interested in the custom, and whenever the doctor got a “good” bound
foot, which probably meant a very bad one, she sent over for me to come
and see it. Anyone who has once seen a bound foot will never forget it.
It always smelt abominably when first the bandages were taken off, and
the first thing the nurses did was to provide a square kerosene tin of
hot water in which to soak the foot well.
Well washed, the feet might be looked at. Shansi especially is the home
of the bound foot, most of the women have such small feet that they are
confined for the greater part of their lives to the _k'ang_. I remember
Dr Lewis in all seriousness saying that he thought on the whole a
Chinese woman was better without her feet. And I'm inclined to think he
was right. The toes, all except the big toe, are pressed back till they
touch the heel, the bandage is put on and drawn tighter and tighter
every day, and if the girl is healthy and big-boned, so much the worse
for her. No matter the size of the girl, the foot must conform to the
one standard. In Shansi when I was there the shoes were generally about
four inches long, and I have taken shoes of that length off a tall and
strapping woman who was tottering along with the aid of a stick. What
she must have suffered to get her feet to that size is too terrible
to imagine. She must have been suffering still for that matter. If the
instep after the tightest binding still sticks up the girl's marriage
chances are seriously interfered with, and then the mother or some
feminine relative takes a meat-chopper and breaks the bone till she can
bind the foot small enough. This information I got from the American
lady who looks after the women in the mission in Fen Chou Fu; and at
T'ai Yuan Fu the sister in the women's hospital added the gruesome
detail that they sometimes pull off the little girls' toe-nails so that
they may not interfere with the binding!
And at the women's hospital at Pao Ting Fu I saw the finished product.
The big toe stuck straight out, red, possibly because of the soaking
in hot water--I never had courage to look at one unsoaked--and
ghastly-looking, the other toes were pressed back against the heel
and the heel went up and was exactly like the Cuban heels affected by
smartly dressed women, only this time it had been worked in flesh
and blood. The whole limb from the big toe to the knee was hard and
immovable as stone. If you press ordinary flesh anywhere it pits, just
yields a little, not so a Chinese woman's leg and foot. It is thin,
perished, literally hard as marble. Once having seen a foot unbound, it
is a wonder to me that any woman should walk at all. And yet they do.
They hold out their arms and walk, balancing themselves, and they use a
stick. Sometimes they walk on their heels, sometimes they try the toe,
but once I realised what those bandages concealed it was a painful and
dreadful thing to me to see a Chinese woman walking. In spite of the
hardness of the flesh, or probably because of it, they get bad corns on
the spot upon which they balance, and sores, very often tuberculous, eat
into the foot.
[Illustration: 0117]
[Illustration: 0118]
But the evil does not stop at the foot. In Shansi it seemed to me every
woman's face was marked with the marks of patient suffering. Travelling
I often got a glimpse of one peering out of a cart or litter at the
foreigner, and that face invariably was patient, pallid and worn, for
foot-binding brings no end of evils in its train. The doctor at Fen Chou
Fu declared that nine-tenths of the women who came to him for treatment
suffered from tuberculosis in some form or another, and this in a
climate that in the winter must outrival in dryness Davos Platts. Not
a few, too, develop spinal curvature low down in the back, and often
because of the displacement of the organs they die in child-birth. A
missionary in one of the little towns I passed through, a trained nurse,
told me that when a woman suffered from what she (the woman) called
leg-waist pains--the doctor called it osteomalacia--her case was
hopeless, she could not give birth to a child. Often this nurse had been
called in to such cases, and she could do nothing to help the suffering
girl. She could only stand by and see her die. I could well believe
these tales of suffering. In Fen Chou Fu and in Pao Ting Fu the women
of the poorer classes freely walked the streets, and their crippled
condition was patent to all eyes. But in some towns it is not considered
seemly for any woman to be seen in the streets. Some reason established
this custom long ago: the reason passes, but China is the most
conservative of nations, and the custom remains. But the reason for
foot-binding is not very clear. There is something sexual at the bottom
of it, I believe, but why a sick and ailing woman should be supposed
to welcome the embraces of her lord more readily than one abounding in
health passes my understanding. Of course we remember that not so very
long ago, in the reign of Victoria, practically the delicate woman
who was always ailing was held up to universal admiration. Look at
the swooning heroines of Dickens and Thackeray. But let no man put the
compressed waist on the same plane as foot-binding. I have heard
more than one man do so, but I unhesitatingly affirm they are wrong.
Foot-binding is infinitely the worse crime. The pinched-in waist did not
begin till the girl was at least well on in her teens, and it was
only the extreme cases--and they did it of their own free will I
presume--who kept up the pressure always. There was always the night for
rest, whereas the Chinese women get no rest from torture.
The missionaries at Fen Chou Fu, being very anxious to improve the
status of the women, used to arrange to have lectures in their large
hall to women only, and they raked the country-side for important people
to address them on subjects that were, or rather that should be, of
interest to women. They were not supposed to have anything to do with
religion, but they discussed openly women's position, were told about
hygiene and the care of children, and the magistrate's wife, she who had
been educated in Japan, told them some home-truths about the position of
women in China.
“American women,” said she on one occasion, “go out into the world and
help in the world's development. We Chinese stay at home and are dragged
along by the men. The time has come when we must learn better things.”
But I looked one day at over seventy women of the richer classes
assembled to listen to a young and enthusiastic Chinese with modern
views on the position of women and their equality with men. He was
passionate, he was eloquent, he was desperately in earnest, but it was
very evident he spoke to deaf ears. I do not think that any one of those
women grasped, or cared for that matter, what he was saying. In the
heart of China woman is very far from being the equal of man. These
women were pets and toys, and they came to the mission station probably
because it was the fashionable form of amusement just then, but they
listened to what was being said with deaf ears and minds incapable
of understanding. They were gaily clad in silks and satins, richly
embroidered; their hair when it was abundant was oiled and elaborately
dressed and decorated with gold and silver pins, and when it was scanty
was hidden under embroidered silken bands; there was not a skirt amongst
them, that was left to the lecturer, their blue and green and brilliant
red trousers were rather narrow, their feet were of the very tiniest
even in Shansi, and their faces, worn and suffering under their paint
and powder, were vacant. Some of them had brought their babies, and only
when a child cried, and they cried fairly frequently, did those faces
light up. That was something they really did understand.
And yet that enthusiastic young scholar in his voluminous petticoats,
with his hair cut in the modern fashion, went on lecturing to them on
the rights of women, the position women ought to occupy!
But the position of women! Toys or slaves are they, toys and slaves have
been their mothers and their grandmothers since the days before the
dawn of history, and very, very slowly is the idea of the possibility of
better things percolating through to the masses in China. It will come,
I suppose, because already there are Government schools for women,
though they are few and far between, and in some places, so far has
the desire for freedom gone, the girls have banded themselves into
societies, declaring that rather than marry a man they have never seen
they will commit suicide, and more than one has taken her own life. But
in the parts of Shansi and Chihli where I was so much light has not yet
penetrated. The wife and mother has influence because any living
thing with which we are closely associated--even if it be but a little
dog--must needs influence us, but all the same the Chinese women are as
a rule mere chattels, dependent entirely upon their menfolk. Amongst
the Chinese the five happinesses are: old age, a son, riches, official
position and a moustache; so slight a thing is a woman that she does not
come in in this connection.
“As far as the heavens are above the earth, so far am I,” disdainfully
proclaimed a Chinese teacher, “above my wife.” And he only spoke as if
stating a self-evident fact, a thing that could not be questioned. “How
could she be my equal?” Just as I might have objected to being put on
the same plane as my mule or my little dog. Indeed I doubt very much
whether he gave the same consideration to his wife as I would do to my
little dog, who is much beloved.
This is not to say, of course, that the men don't consider the women.
They do.
I remember the gate-keeper at Pao Ting Fu mission paying up for his
daughter's schooling. He was a jovial old soul, so old that I was
surprised to hear he had a mother.
“Short am I?” said he cheerfully. “Short? Oh, that dollar and a half!”
He paused to consider the matter, then added: “And I was thinking about
borrowing a dollar from you. My mother's dying, and I want to buy her a
skirt! Must be prepared, you know!”
The old lady, said Miss Newton, had probably never owned such a luxury
as a skirt in her life, but that was her son's way of being good to
her, for the people have a proverb to the effect that the most important
thing in life is to be buried well, an idea that isn't entirely unknown
in Western and more enlightened lands. Poor old lady, whose one and
only skirt came to her to be buried in, or perhaps it would be taken off
before she was buried, for the Chinese are a careful people. I remember
one frugal man who celebrated the funeral of his mother and the marriage
of his son at the same time, so that the funeral baked meats did for
the marriage feast, and the same musicians did for both. The coffin,
of heavy black wood, tall as a mantelpiece, stood in the yard, with the
eldest son and his wife clad in white as mourners, and the rest of
the company made merry in the house over the bridal. It was the most
exquisite piece of thrift, but the Chinaman is _par excellence_ an
economist.
It was in Pao Ting Fu that I met the only woman who made open complaint
against the position of women, and she only did it because, poor thing,
she was driven to it.
She slipped through the mission compound gate while the gate-keeper was
looking the other way, a miserable, unkempt woman with roughened hair
and maimed feet. Her coat and trousers of the poorest blue cotton were
old and soiled, and the child she carried in her arms was naked save
for a little square of blue cotton tied round his body in front. She
was simply a woman of the people, deadly poor where all just escape
starvation, young and comely where many are unattractive, and she stood
under the shade of the trees watching eagerly the mission family and
their guest at breakfast on the porch! It was a June morning, the
sunshine that would be too fierce later on now at 7 a.m. was golden, and
a gentle breeze just whispered softly in the branches that China--even
Pao Ting Fu--in the early summer morning was a delightful place.
But eager watching eyes glued to every mouthful are distinctly
disquieting, and in China, the land of punctilious etiquette, are rude.
Besides, she had no business to be there, and the doctor's wife turned
and spoke to her.
“What custom is this?” said she, using the vernacular, “and how did you
get in here?”
“I ran past”--ran, save the mark, with those poor broken cramped
feet--“when the gate-keeper was not looking. And it's not a day's hunger
I have. For weeks when we have had a meal we have not known where the
next was coming from.”
“But you have a husband?”
“And he was rich,” assented the woman, “but he has gambled it all away.”
It was quite a likely story. Another woman working on the compound said
it was true. She had a bad husband--_hi yah!_ a very bad husband. He
beat her, often he beat her. Sometimes perhaps it was her fault, because
she was bad-tempered. Who would not be bad-tempered with maimed feet, an
empty stomach and two little hungry children? But often he beat her
for no reason at all. And everyone knows that a Chinese husband has a
perfect right to beat his wife. That he refrains from so doing is an act
of grace on his part, but a woman of herself is merely his chattel. She
has no rights.
The hospital quilted bed-covers--_pel wos_, they called them--had to be
unripped and washed. The pay was twenty-five _t'ung tzus_ a day and keep
yourself. One hundred and thirty _t'ung tzus_ went to the dollar, and
10-35 dollars went to the sovereign at that time, so that the work
could not be considered overpaid; but this was China, and the women were
apparently rising up out of the ground and clamouring for it. It was
evidently looked upon as quite a recreation to sit under the trees on
the grass in the mission compound and gossip and unpick quilts. The new
recruit joined them and spent a happy day, sure of food for herself and
her children for that day at least--not food perhaps such as we would
appreciate, but at least a sufficiency of millet porridge.
That day and the next she worked, and then on the third day at midday
she went away for her meal and did not come back till after two o'clock
in the afternoon. The doctor's wife was reproachful.
“You have been away for over three hours. Why is this?”
She was a true Chinese and found it difficult to give a direct answer.
“I have been talking to my mother,” said she, rousing wrath where she
might have gained sympathy.
“What excuse is this?” said the doctor's wife. “You go away, and when
I ask you why, you tell me you have been talking to your mother! Your
mother should have more sense than to keep you from your work!”
“But my husband has sold me!” protested the culprit and then we saw that
her face was swollen with crying; “and I am a young woman and I don't
know what to do when my husband sells me. He keeps the children and
he sells me, and Tsao, the man who has bought me, is a bad man,” and
dropping down to the ground she let the tears fall on to the work in her
hands.
“I am young and so I don't know what to do.” It was the burden of her
song. It may be she is wailing still, for the story was unfinished when
I left. She was young and she didn't know what to do. She would not have
minded leaving her husband if only the man to whom she had been sold had
been a better man, but he bore a worse reputation if anything than her
husband, and ignorant, unlearned in all things of this world as she was,
she and the women round her knew exactly what her fate would be. Tsao
would sell her when he tired of her, and her next purchaser would do
likewise, and as she gets older and her white teeth decay and her bright
eyes fade and her comeliness wanes her money value will grow less and
less, and beating and starvation will be her portion till death comes
as a merciful release. But, as she kept repeating pathetically, she is
young, and death is the goal at the end of a weary, weary, heartbreaking
road.
For her husband was quite within his rights. He could sell her. It may
be, of course, he will be swayed by public opinion, and public opinion
is against the disposing of a wife after this fashion.
“Let her complain to the official,” suggested my assurance.
But the wise women who knew rose up in horror at the depths of ignorance
I was disclosing.
“Go to the yamen and complain of her husband!”
It is no crime for a man to sell his wife, but it is a deadly crime for
a woman to speak evil of her husband! She was not yet handed over. All
he would have to do would be to deny it, and then she would be convicted
of this crime and to her other ills would be added the wrath of the
official. No, something better than that must be thought of.
She had been sold for a hundred _tiaou_--something under four
pounds--and when the money was paid she would have to go to her new
master, far away from all her friends.
“_Hi yah!_” said the other women. “What a bad man!” So public opinion
was against it!
It would do no good to buy her freedom unless the purchaser were
prepared to take upon himself the conduct of her future life. A woman
must belong to somebody in China; she is, except in very exceptional
cases and among the very advanced, considered incapable of guiding her
own life, and pay this and the man would still regard her as his wife
and sell her again.
Then a woman wise with wisdom of the people arose.
“There is only one thing to be done,” said she; “you must pretend you
know nothing about it, and when Tsao comes, and you are sold, then make
an excuse and run to the yamen. It may be the official will help, for it
is a wicked thing.”
“Run to the yamen!” on feet on which she could just totter. But the wise
woman had taken that into consideration.
“Mark well the way so you may hide in the turnings.”
Such a forlorn, pitiful little hope! But with it she had to be content,
and that night she held her peace and pretended she did not know
the fate that hung over her, and when I left she was still ripping
bed-covers with the other women. She had had no hand in bringing about
her own fate, for she did not choose this man. She had never seen him
till she was handed over on her marriage day by her parents.
“What,” said the women at one place when a new missionary came to them,
“forty and not married! What freedom! How did you manage it! What good
fortune!”
In China there is no respectable word, so I am told, to denote a
bachelor, and there was almost never, at least under the old regime,
such a thing as an old maid. Every woman must belong to someone, and
few and far between are the families that can afford to keep unmarried
daughters, so the women regard as eminently fortunate those foreign
women they come across, missionary or otherwise, who are apparently free
to guide their own lives.
Of course the average husband would no more think of selling his wife
than would an Englishman, but, unlike the Englishman, he knows that he
has the right to do so should he so please, even as he has the right
of life and death over her and his children. She is his chattel, to be
faithful to her would simply be foolishness.
They tell a story of an angry father found digging a hole in which he
proposed to bury his son alive. That son had been insolent, and it was
a terrible thing to have an insolent son. His mother wept, but to her
tears the father paid no heed. A stranger passed along and questioned
the little company, and finding in his heart pity for the woman and the
lad, cast about how he might help them. He did not set about it as we of
the West would have done.
He commiserated with the father. It was a terrible thing to have an
insolent son. Undoubtedly he deserved death. But it would be a bad thing
to have no son to worship at the ancestral tablet.
That was provided for, said the irate parent. He had two other sons.
That was well! That was well! And of course they had sons?
No, they were young. They had no sons yet.
A-a-ah! And suppose anything happened by which they both should die?
The stranger let that sink in. He had struck the right chord. It
would be a terrible thing to have no son to worship at the ancestral
tablet--to think that he by his own act----
Chinese reasoning prevailed, and the son's life was spared.
And yet the Chinese are fond of their children and, according to their
lights, good to their wives. It is that under the patriarchal system
children and women--a woman is always a child, a very ignorant child as
a rule--have no rights. They are dependent upon the good will of their
owners.
And so the woman sitting waiting to see if her husband would complete
the bargain and sell her had no rights. She was just a chattel in the
eye of the law. And there was none to help. Miserere Domine! It was just
possible public opinion would save her. It was her only hope. Miserere
Domine! Miserere Domine!
In Fen Chou Fu the missionaries had started an adult school for women.
First it was started, as they themselves put it, to teach the Gospel,
but then wisely they extended it and taught reading, writing and
arithmetic, and very eager indeed were the pupils. It is only fair to
say that very often husbands, or possibly fathers-in-law--for a woman
belongs to the head of her husband's family, or at least owes allegiance
to him--aided and abetted in every way, and when necessary sent the
pupils twenty and thirty miles in carts and in litters from away in
the mountains to attend. One woman with four little children, all under
five, with another coming, was a most eager pupil. Her children were
sent to the kindergarten, which is in charge of a young Chinese teacher
educated by the missionaries.
Again I do not say the Chinese are not doing something to ameliorate the
condition of their women. I can only speak of what I saw, and what I saw
was, here in Shansi, the wives of the most miserable peasants sunk in
ignorance and hardly able to crawl from the _k'angs_ on which they spent
their lives. The men do the cooking because the women are incapable, and
the mortality among the children is terrible. A doctor told me that
very often he had attended a woman at the birth of her thirteenth or
fourteenth child and only one or two would be living!
I don't know how many wives or concubines a man is allowed. Only the
first one has any standing, and the number of the others is probably
limited by his means. I remember hearing of one man, a Mr Feng, who had
just married his second wife to another man because she was making his
life too miserable for him. This was the man's side of the story; I had
heard the woman's the last time. I wonder how the case is put on these
occasions. Does a man say he is parting with the lady with extreme
regret because the climate does not suit her, or because his first wife
does not like her, or because a sudden reverse of fortune has compelled
him to reduce his household? He surely would never have given the real
reason. My friend Mr Farrer waxes enthusiastic over things Chinese, but
I must say what I have seen of their domestic life repels me, and I
am rather inclined to agree with a missionary of my acquaintance--a
bachelor though--that it would give nervous prostration to a brazen
statue.
There can be little happiness where there is ignorance, and the majority
of the women of Shansi anyhow are the ignorant slaves of ignorant
slaves. Miserere Domine!