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 homes
rather as servants than daughters to the husband's mother. Every
woman, as indeed every man, has one final appeal by which to punish an
oppressor. She may commit suicide, there being no canon, legal or moral,
against self-slaughter; and in China, where, contrary to widespread
notions on the subject, human life is held in the highest degree sacred,
this course is sure to entail trouble and expense, and possibly severe
punishment, if the aggrieved parties are not promptly conciliated by a
heavy money payment.

A man may divorce his wife for one of the seven following reasons:--Want
of children, adultery, neglect of his parents, nagging, thieving (i.e.
supplying her own family with his goods, popularly known as "leakage"),
jealous temper and leprosy. To the above, the humanity of the lawgiver
has affixed three qualifying conditions. He may not put her away on
any of the above grounds if she has duly passed through the period of
mourning for his parents; if he has grown rich since their marriage; if
she has no longer any home to which she can return.

Altogether, the Chinese woman has by no means such a bad time as is
generally supposed to be the case. Even in the eye of the law, she has
this advantage over a man, that she cannot be imprisoned except for high
treason and adultery, and is to all intents and purposes exempt from the
punishment of the bamboo. Included in this exemption are the aged and
the young, the sic