Last week an atrocious instance, not of divorce, but of wife-murder, occurred within bow-shot of my house.  A man engaged in a coal-shop had left his wife with an aunt in the country.  The aunt complained of her as being too stupid and clumsy to earn a living.  Her brutal husband thereon took the poor girl to a lonely spot, where he killed her, and left her unburied.  Returning to the coal-shop, he sent word to his aunt that he was ready to answer for what he had done, if called to account.  “Has he been called to account?” [Page 300] I enquired this morning of one of his neighbours.  “Oh no! was the reply; it’s all settled; the woman is buried, and no inquiry is called for.”  Is not woman a slave, though called a wife, in a society where such things are allowed to go with impunity?  Will not the new laws, from which so much is expected, limit the marriage relation to one woman, and make the man, to whom she is bound, a husband, not a master?

Confucius, we are told, resigned office in his native state when the prince accepted a bevy of singing girls sent from a neighbouring principality.  The girls were slaves bought and trained for their shameful profession, and the traffic in girls for the same service constitutes the leading form of domestic slavery at this day—­so little has been the progress in morals, so little advance toward a legislation that protects the life and virtue of the helpless!

But the slave traffic is not confined to women; any man may sell his son; and classes of both sexes are found in all the houses of the rich.  Praedial servitude was practised in ancient times, as it was in Europe in the Middle Ages, and in Russia till a recent day.  We read of lands and labourers being conferred on court favourites.  How the system came to disappear we need not pause to inquire.  It is certain, however, that no grand act of emancipation ever took place in China like that which cost Lincoln his life, or that for which the good Czar Alexander II. had to pay the same forfeit.  Russia is to-day eating the bitter fruits of ages of serfdom; and the greatest peril ever encountered by the United States was a war brought on by negro slavery.

[Page 301] The form of slavery prevailing in China is not one that threatens war or revolutions; but in its social aspects it is worse than negro slavery.  It depraves morals and corrupts the family, and as long as it exists, it carries the brand of barbarism.  China has great men, who for the honour of their country would not be afraid to take the matter in hand.  They would, if necessary, imitate Lincoln and the Czar Alexander to effect the removal of such a blot.