A Chinese official Provincial Treasurer of Hupei has issued an
edict forbidding the drowning of female children, which he says takes place to the number of 80 per cent. He regularly argues with his people, tells them they can send their children to the Foundling Hospital, assures them that their daughters will find husbands—which must be true enough, if this destruction goes on—and at last threatens the people with the vengeance of Heaven, in the form of repeated female births. Killing female babies, he remarks sagaciously, does not make male babies come, and there is the child's wraith to be thought about, which may haunt the mother. The Treasurer is evidently very much in earnest, and threatens all people, and particularly all soldiers, with some monstrous calamity from Heaven, if they persevere, and besides with punishment as wilful homicides. He will have to adopt the Indian system at last, and make it a great offence for a village to have fewer girls of eight than boys, a rule based on the ascertained fact that girls not killed at once are never killed afterwards.
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