Democratic Sentinel, Volume 3, Number 51, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 January 1880 — Infanticide and Tight Shoes. [ARTICLE]

Infanticide and Tight Shoes.

There are districts of China where infanticide prevails to -an incredible extent—a murder of female children mainly. The higher estimate of women is the product of Christian teaching; and, though women in Chinft are comparatively free from seclusion, and have been regents of the empire, and eminent for literary accomplishments, and although a son pays profound regard to his mother, even the Emperor kneeling before her, yet the woman is despised, and female life is cheap. “When little girls die, alio same chicken,” the Chinaman says; “when the little boy die, too bad;” and, notwithstanding that the traveling vaccinator charges a shilling to vaccinate a boy and only sixpence for a girl, parents wili rather let their girls run tne risk than pay the lower fee. Women will confess to the number they have destroyed. An ayah where we staid had killed two. A man will sometimes carry the child in a basket along the roads with perfect unconcern, though his destination is the nearest pond, and the babies’ pond is sometimes a village institution, and “it is no uncommon thing to see the bodies floating upon its green slimy surface.” Parents have been asked to take back a child that, was exposed to die, and have absolutely declined. There are districts where only seventenths of the female children are ■ kept alive, and others where, notwithstanding the immense emigration of men, there are not enough women to be wives for the men that are left. Of course a sin like this ceases in a Christian congregation, but the reformation is not stayed there, for in many neighborhoods there is a growing repugnance to the practice, a weighing of it in quite other scales, aud what the protest of many of the best men in China failed to do is being already silently done by the influences that spread from the mission. There is another practice far more universal, but which some suppose to be connected with infanticide, the barbarous fashion of binding the feet, so as to render them not only useless, but diseased; for girls thus treated are,of course, a useless burden to their parents if not married. The Chinese themselves have tried to deal with this habit. It is a huge tyranny of fashion, and cannot even plead royalty in its favor, the present dynasty not binding the feet of their women; while one of the Emperors even issued an ineffectual edict against it, aud would have issued another weighted with heavy penalties, but that his throne would have been overturned. The native churches are now taking the matter in hand, and are here and there forming “Anti-foot-binding Societies,” and sometimes the matter is discussed in the Church Synod. “Mr. Z. can easily speak against it,” said a native pastor, “for he has no daughters; but I am not so; it is in the hands of my wife, and I cannot prevent it;” and that really tenches the root of the matter. It is for the nat.ve Christian mothers to take action as they are doing, and neither to torture their daughters, nor, “in selecting wives for our sons, if the girl is intelligent and in other respects suitable, should we reject her because she has large feet;” and the custom of 1,000 years, a custom stronger than the throne, is already in some Christian centers yielding to the influence of Christian principle.—Good Words. .