e is
too young to know her own real nature or to have a mind to make up
about what she would wish for herself, it may be and generally is an
evil thing. In the questions concerning the family set forth by the
Chinese inquiry, to which allusion has already been made, the first
set of problems relates to "Early Engagements," and it is asked, "Is
the practice of parents in arranging for the engagement of a girl
while still a mere child productive of happiness in the future home?"
And, again, "Can a woman refuse to marry a man whom her family decides
she should marry, after the formal engagement has taken place?" To our
Western ideas the answer is so plain to both these questions that one
may be impatient at their repetition here. Yet it is certainly true
that many people freely engage themselves to their later unhappiness
and there have been many family virtues bred on even the outgrown
fashion of family choice. Where unhappiness has been prevented in the
results of family choice doubtless the friendship of the two family
heads has had much to do with such mitigation of bad effects of
extreme parental control in marriage.

Social protection of the young has in a measure superseded the ancient
family arrangement, but where it has not, a young person may be found
to-day in as bad a position through personal choice as that of the
girl set in a home without her own consent to be the future wife of a
man she has not seen. The difference is, however, a vital one.

In the case of the Chinese girl the status is fixed. In the case of a
girl of the Western world, even of most unfortunate circumstance or
weakness of character, there is a possibility of escape from even the
worst conditions into a new relationship to life and to marriage. We
have suicides in the Western world, and some of them of young girls
who, free to choose their mates, loved not wisely but too well; but
the toll of suicides of wives in China is one that testifies that
polygamy and the power of fathers over their daughters in marriage and
even in their sale for immoral uses, and the legal right to hold girls
in domestic slavery, are evils not made tolerable even by the
high-minded who try to perpetuate the friendship as well as the power
of leading families by intermarriage.

An early Massachusetts law declared that "No female orphan could be
given in marriage during her minority except with the approbation of a
majority of the selectmen of the town." This was