n, and
openly inviting, as it were, the most unnatural and heartless of
murders, are among the most hideous spectacles to be met with in a
heathen land. True, a river or a pond will be pointed out to you in
other parts of China, or in India, where babies are daily drowned like
puppies or kittens; but they do not affect the mind with such a horror
as these palpable structures, erected with the best skill of their
architects for this express purpose. The water closes over the murdered
infant, and no trace of the crime remains; but here is a tower--a high
tower--with deep foundations, filled with the bones of murdered babes
that have been accumulating for generations.

No wonder that Christian mothers, resident in the East, cannot speak of
them or see them without a shudder, and never willingly pass them in
their drives. Who knows but they might hear, if they approached the
tower, the wail of some poor infant just thrown in, or meet its father
returning from his cruel errand!

At Shanghai the Baby Tower stands on the southwest side of the city,
without the walls, but at Foo-Chow, where the crime of infanticide is
still more prevalent, they use no baby towers, but have provided ponds
for this express purpose. It is the saddest part of this great national
crime of the Chinese, that it is sanctioned by the mandarins, and viewed
as a disagreeable necessity, not as a crime.

It has been the fashion of late years to deny the existence of this
abomination; the doubters, wise in their own conceit, insisting that the
crime is too great for human nature.

Human nature, unfortunately, has proved but a frail barrier to crime of
this character in all parts of the world, and the facts of Chinese
infanticide are indisputable. The witnesses are too numerous, the crime
is too public, and the evidences of it too notorious to deny its
existence. The children destroyed are girls; the most common methods of
destroying them are: 1st, by drowning in a tub of water; 2d, by throwing
into some running stream; 3d, by burying alive. The last-named mode is
adopted under the hope and with the superstitious belief that the next
birth will be a boy. The excuse is that it is too expensive to educate a
girl, but if some friend will take the child to bring up as a wife for a
little boy, the parents will sell or give away the infant rather than
destroy it. The regular price is two thousand copper cash, or $2, for
every year of their lives; for sometimes