civilisation. The women of the poorer classes
in China have to work hard indeed for the bowl of
rice and cabbage which forms their daily food, but
not more so than women of their own station in other
countries where the necessaries of life are dearer,
children more numerous, and a drunken husband rather
the rule than the exception. Now the working
classes in China are singularly sober; opium is beyond
their means, and few are addicted to the use of Chinese
wine. Both men and women smoke, and enjoy their
pipe of tobacco in the intervals of work; but this
seems to be almost their only luxury. Hence it
follows that every cash earned either by the man or
woman goes towards procuring food and clothes instead
of enriching the keepers of grog-shops; besides which
the percentage of quarrels and fights is thus very
materially lessened. A great drag on the poor
in China is the family tie, involving as it does not
only the support of aged parents, but a supply of
rice to uncles, brothers, and cousins of remote degrees
of relationship, during such time as these may be
out of work. Of course such a system cuts both
ways, as the time may come when the said relatives
supply, in their turn, the daily meal; and the support
of parents in a land where poor-rates are unknown,
has tended to place the present high premium on male
offspring. Thus, though there is a great deal
of poverty in China, there is very little absolute
destitution, and the few wretched outcasts one does
see in every Chinese town, are almost invariably the
once opulent victims of the opium-pipe or the gaming-table.
The relative number of human beings who suffer from
cold and hunger in China is far smaller than in England,
and in this all-important respect, the women of the
working classes are far better off than their European
sisters. Wife-beating is unknown, though power
of life and death is, under certain circumstances,
vested in the husband (Penal Code, S. 293); while,
on the other hand, a wife may be punished with a hundred
blows for merely striking her husband, who is also
entitled to a divorce (Penal Code, S. 315). The
truth is, that these poor women are, on the whole,
very well treated by their husbands, whom they not
unfrequently rule with as harsh a tongue as that of
any western shrew.
In the fanciful houses of the rich, the Chinese woman
is regarded with even more sympathy by foreigners
generally than is accorded to her humbler fellow-countrywoman.
She is represented as a mere ornament, or a soulless,
listless machine—something on which the
sensual eye of her opium-smoking lord may rest with
pleasure while she prepares the fumes which will waft
him to another hour or so of tipsy forgetfulness.
She knows nothing, she is taught nothing, never leaves
the house, never sees friends, or hears the news; she
is, consequently, devoid of the slightest intellectual
effort, and no more a companion to her husband than
the stone dog at his front gate. Now, although
we do not profess much personal acquaintance with the