“Call that a bitterness?” smiled the relict cheerfully, and her would-be consoler felt the ground cut away beneath her feet.
But perhaps that sympathiser was not quite as much dismayed as another lady who offered her condolences upon a similar occasion. The new-made widow was a gay old thing, and she remarked blandly, with a toss of her head:
“All, we don't worry about things like that when we've got the Gospel!” which left that well-meaning teacher a little uncertain as to whether she had instructed her in the doctrines of her new faith quite correctly.
Fen Chou Fu is a town that lends itself to reform, that asks for it. When I was there they had a magistrate who had been educated in Japan and was ready to back any measures for the good of the town. He was too much imbued with the spirit of modern thought to be a Christian, but he was full of admiration for many of the measures advocated by these enthusiastic young people from Oberlin College. There is a large Government school here—you may see the courtyards with their lily ponds and bridges from the wall—that has been in existence for hundreds of years, and this magistrate appealed to the missionaries to take it over and institute their modern methods. They might even, so he said, teach their own faith there. The only thing that stood in the way was want of funds, for though the school was endowed, money has still a way of sticking to the hands through which it passes in China. The missionaries were rather inclined, I think, to have hopes of his conversion, but I do not think it is very easy to convert the broad-minded man who sees the good in all creeds. This magistrate was anxious to help his people sunk in ignorance and was wise enough to use every means that came in his way, for he knows, knowing his own people, you will never Westernise a Chinaman. He will take all that is good—or bad—in the West that appeals to him, and he will mould it in his own way. This magistrate was building an industrial school for criminal boys close to the mission station and, more progressive than the West itself, he allowed his wife to sit on the bench beside him and try and sentence women proved guilty of crime.
CHAPTER V—“MISERERE DOMINE!”
As I have said more than once, it seems to me the most intolerable thing in life would be to be a Chinese woman. I remember when first I began to write about China I asked a friend of mine to look over my work and he objected to my making such a fuss about the condition of the women.
“Why, people will think you are a suffragette!” said he, searching for some term of obloquy that he felt could not possibly apply to me.
But I am a suffragist, an ardent suffragist, realising that a woman is most valuable neither as an angel nor as a slave, but as a useful citizen, and I saw then that he possibly knew little about the condition of his own women, and probably absolutely nothing at all about the condition of the women of the race who swarmed around him. Those he met would be dumb, and at any rate no right-minded woman begins upon her wrongs to a stranger. In any country it would be bad taste, in China no words can tell what shocking bad taste. I had to seek further afield for my information, and I got it from the medical missions. Now I went to China with a strong prejudice against missionaries, and I found there many people who backed me up. And then it occurred to me that I had better go to a mission station and see what manner of people were these I was judging so hastily and so finally.