And yet the Chinese are fond of their children and, according to their lights, good to their wives. It is that under the patriarchal system children and women—a woman is always a child, a very ignorant child as a rule—have no rights. They are dependent upon the good will of their owners.
And so the woman sitting waiting to see if her husband would complete the bargain and sell her had no rights. She was just a chattel in the eye of the law. And there was none to help. Miserere Domine! It was just possible public opinion would save her. It was her only hope. Miserere Domine! Miserere Domine!
In Fen Chou Fu the missionaries had started an adult school for women. First it was started, as they themselves put it, to teach the Gospel, but then wisely they extended it and taught reading, writing and arithmetic, and very eager indeed were the pupils. It is only fair to say that very often husbands, or possibly fathers-in-law—for a woman belongs to the head of her husband's family, or at least owes allegiance to him—aided and abetted in every way, and when necessary sent the pupils twenty and thirty miles in carts and in litters from away in the mountains to attend. One woman with four little children, all under five, with another coming, was a most eager pupil. Her children were sent to the kindergarten, which is in charge of a young Chinese teacher educated by the missionaries.
Again I do not say the Chinese are not doing something to ameliorate the condition of their women. I can only speak of what I saw, and what I saw was, here in Shansi, the wives of the most miserable peasants sunk in ignorance and hardly able to crawl from the k'angs on which they spent their lives. The men do the cooking because the women are incapable, and the mortality among the children is terrible. A doctor told me that very often he had attended a woman at the birth of her thirteenth or fourteenth child and only one or two would be living!
I don't know how many wives or concubines a man is allowed. Only the first one has any standing, and the number of the others is probably limited by his means. I remember hearing of one man, a Mr Feng, who had just married his second wife to another man because she was making his life too miserable for him. This was the man's side of the story; I had heard the woman's the last time. I wonder how the case is put on these occasions. Does a man say he is parting with the lady with extreme regret because the climate does not suit her, or because his first wife does not like her, or because a sudden reverse of fortune has compelled him to reduce his household? He surely would never have given the real reason. My friend Mr Farrer waxes enthusiastic over things Chinese, but I must say what I have seen of their domestic life repels me, and I am rather inclined to agree with a missionary of my acquaintance—a bachelor though—that it would give nervous prostration to a brazen statue.
There can be little happiness where there is ignorance, and the majority of the women of Shansi anyhow are the ignorant slaves of ignorant slaves. Miserere Domine!
CHAPTER VI—BY MOUNTAIN AND RIVER
Setting out on a long journey by road, moving along slowly, at the rate of thirty miles a day, I find I do not have the end in view in my mind all the time. I do subconsciously, of course, or I would never get on at all, but I take a point a couple of days ahead and concentrate on getting there. Having arrived so far, I am so pleased with the performance I can concentrate on the next couple of days ahead. So I pass on comfortably, with the invigorating feeling of, something accomplished.