Also, because girls require dowries, which they take away with them for the benefit of other families than their own; hence the saying, “There is no thief like a family of five daughters,” and the term “lose-money goods,” as jestingly applied to girls, against which may be set another term, “a thousand ounces of gold,” which is commonly used of a daughter.  Of course it is the boy who is specially wanted in a family; and little boys are often dressed as little girls, in order to deceive the angels of disease and death, who, it is hoped, may thus pass them over as of less account.

To return to the belief formerly held that female infanticide was rampant all over China.  The next step was for the honest observer to admit that it was not known in his own particular district, but to declare that it was largely practised elsewhere.  This view, however, lost its validity when residents “elsewhere” had to allow that no traces of infanticide could be found in their neighbourhood; and so on.  Luckily, still greater comfort is to be found in the following argument,—­a rare example of proving a negative—­from which it will be readily seen that female infanticide on any abnormal scale is quite beyond the bounds of the possible.  Those who have even a bowing acquaintance with Chinese social life will grant that every boy, at about the age of eighteen, is provided by his parents with a wife.  They must also concede the notorious fact that many well-to-do Chinese take one or more concubines.  The Emperor, indeed, is allowed seventy; but this number exists only on paper as a regulation maximum.  Now, if every Chinaman has one wife, and many have two, over and above the host of girls said to be annually sacrificed as worthless babies, it must follow that the proportion of girls born in China enormously outnumbers the proportion of boys, whereas in the rest of the world boys are well known to be always in the majority.  After this, it is perhaps superfluous to state that, apart from the natural love of the parent, a girl is really, even at a very early age, a marketable commodity.  Girls are sometimes sold into other families to be brought up as wives for the sons; more often, to be used as servants, under what is of course a form of slavery, qualified by the important condition, which can be enforced by law, that when of a marriageable age, the girl’s master shall find her a husband.  Illegitimate children, the source of so much baby-farming and infanticide elsewhere, are practically unknown in China; and the same may be said of divorce.  A woman cannot legally divorce her husband.  In rare cases she will leave him, and return to her family, in spite of the fact that he can legally insist upon her return; for she knows well that if her case is good, the husband will not dare to risk the scandal of an exposure, not to mention the almost certain vengeance of her affronted kinsmen.  It is also the fear of such vengeance that prevents mothers-in-law from ill-treating the girls who pass into their new