reason indeed.  There should be a better argument for the doing of what is contrary to reason and nature.  Nature is a wise mother, and she bestows on us no member of the body that is unnecessary.  The thought of her fostering care was well expressed by the old Greeks who lived an out-door life, in their personification of Mother Earth under the creation of their Demeter, perfect in form and beautiful in expression and noble in action.  This is far above the conceptions of nature or of a presiding genius over our lives, taking into account social order and marriage vows, which we find in Chinese literature or mythology.  It is not difficult to perceive the reason why the Greeks, who rule the realms of philosophy and art and literature to-day, after the lapse of many centuries, are the superior people.  Well does that master-mind, Shakespeare, characterise evil custom: 

  “That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat,
  Of habits devil.”

But a better day is coming for Chinese women.  Wherever Christianity has touched them in the past they have been uplifted and benefited.  The sun seems now to rise in greater effulgence on the Kingdom of the Yellow Dragon.  The wretched custom of dwarfing and destroying the feet of a child whose misfortune, according to Confucius, it is to be born a female, is giving way under pressure from contact with the enlightened nations of the world.  The teachings of the Christian Church are having their salutary effect and Chinamen are beginning to learn the value of a woman’s life from the Biblical standpoint, and the daughters of the Flowery Kingdom will, as time goes on, become more and more like the polished corners of the Temple, or the Caryatides supporting the entablature of the Erechtheum at Athens.  It is Madame Wu Ting-Fang, wife of the Chinese Minister at Washington, who has recently returned from a visit to her old home, who says:  “The first penetrating influence of exterior civilisation on the customs of my country has touched the conditions of women.  The emancipation of woman in China means, first of all, the liberation of her feet, and this is coming.  Indeed, it has already come in a measure, for the style in feet has changed.  Wee bits of feet, those no longer than an infant’s, are no longer the fashion.  When I went back home I found that the rigid binding and forcing back of the feet was largely a thing of the past.  China, with other nations, has come to regard that practice as barbarous, but the small feet, those that enable a woman to walk a little and do not inconvenience her in getting about the house, are still favoured by the Chinese ladies.”