China and Its People Author:William Henry Withrow Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: the designation of " baby towers." With no weeping father to follow the little coffin (if any it has), and no tender mother to plant flowers on the little grave ... more »(if grave it has), it is cast out as an unclean thing.and consigned to speedy oblivion—oftentimes indeed abandoned to the beasts of the field and the birds of the air. Prayer is never offered for female children, and their coming is viewed as a calamity. A Chinese official report says, " Many of them are consigned to the nearest pond or stream." They are often drowned in tubs of water, strangled or buried alive, as one might a litter of kittens, and all this largely and often wholly because they, as girls, cannot make offerings of food at the family tombs and in the ancestral halls. It is estimated that about half of the female children in the empire are destroyed in infancy. SOCIAL ORGANIZATION OF THE CHINESE. Rev. B. (..'. Henry, Presbyterian missionary at Canton, Chiiiii, in his book on " The Cross and the Dragon," notes the following characteristics of the social organization of the Chinese: " The political system of the Chinese, their moral code, their standard books of philosophy and literature, have come down to them for twenty centuries or more. Growing out of this intense love and reverence for the past, we find an ultra conservatism. The ruling classes, the officials and gentry, the custodians of these treasures of the past, are opposed to innovations and reforms of every kind. They are exclusiveto the extremest degree, and would never have had intercourse with other nations had they not been compelled to do so. " Closely connected with this spirit of exclusive- ness is an overweening pride and absurd conceit in their own superiority, and an unreasoning hatred of everything foreign. It is enough to sa...« less