Another deals with the subject of marriage.  Many improvements, he says, are to be made in the legal status of woman.  The total abolition of polygamy might be premature; but that is to be kept in view.  In another issue he expresses a regret that the Western usage of personal courtship cannot safely be introduced.  Those who are to be companions for life cannot as yet be allowed to see each other, as disorders might result from excess of freedom.  Such liberty [Page 216] in social relations is impracticable “except in a highly refined and well-ordered state of society.”  The same or another writer proposes, by way of enlarging woman’s world, that she shall not be confined to the house, but be allowed to circulate as freely as Western women but she must hide her charms behind a veil.

Reporting an altercation between a policeman and the driver of one of Prince Ching’s carts, who insisted on driving on tracks forbidden to common people, an editor suggests with mild sarcasm that a notice be posted in such cases stating that only “noblemen’s carts are allowed to pass.”  Do not these specimens show a laudable attempt to simulate a free press?  Free it is by sufferance, though not by law.

Reading-rooms are a new institution full of promise.  They are not libraries, but places for reading and expounding newspapers for the benefit of those who are unable to read for themselves.  Numerous rooms may be seen at the street corners, where men are reciting the contents of a paper to an eager crowd.  They have the air of wayside chapels; and this mode of enlightening the ignorant was confessedly borrowed from the missionary.  How urgent the need, where among the men only one in twenty can read; and among women not one in a hundred!

Reform in writing is a genuine novelty, Chinese writing being a development of hieroglyphics, in which the sound is no index to the sense, and in which each pictorial form must be separately made familiar to the eye.  Dr. Medhurst wittily calls it “an occulage, not a language.”  Without the introduction of alphabetic [Page 217] writing, the art of reading can never become general.  To meet this want a new alphabet of fifty letters has been invented, and a society organised to push the system, so that the common people, also women, may soon be able to read the papers for themselves.  The author of the system is Wang Chao, mentioned above as having given occasion for the coup d’etat by which the Dowager Empress was restored to power in 1898.

I close this formidable list of reforms with a few words on a society for the abolition of a usage which makes Chinese women the laughing-stock of the world, namely, the binding of their feet.  With the minds of her daughters cramped by ignorance, and their feet crippled by the tyranny of an absurd fashion, China suffers an immense loss, social and economic.  Happily there are now indications that the proposed enfranchisement will meet with general favour.