ARTICLE IV.-HOW AMERICAN WOMEN ARE HELPING THEIR SISTERS.*

THE work which is being done for women at the present time gives illustration of the fact constantly recurring in human affairs, that the most substantial and far reaching social movements are wrought out quietly, and come slowly toward maturity. For the best social circles, in our country, are pervaded by a movement for woman's welfare, so wide-spread and even now so fruitful, as to promise results very far beyond any contemplated by those loud-mouthed claimants of the "rights" of the sex to whom the general public has listened so frequently.

It is clear enough, indeed, that the degradation of woman, in the world, has not as yet been very widely or thoroughly understood. A rapid glance may show this, and give some fair gauge of the efforts which are now being made to remedy it. We may remember, then, first, that the women of the Indian Empire alone are a fourteenth part of the human race. Throughout this Empire, women on the approach of childbirth have an anguish which is quite unknown to mothers in Christian lands-the fear that their child may be a daughter. No joy greets the coming of such a child into an Indian home. The daughter is an intruder, without claim upon maternal affection. Caste distinction may even require that she be put to death. If she is not, she must be married in seven or eight years; but in high caste particularly, suitable marriages are not easily effected, hence the only way of escape often is to kill a girl as soon as she is born. A skillful pressure on the neck, a small pill of opium, would be often resorted to if governmental vigilance were not feared, but in most cases the desired end can be attained by other means. Intended lack of care, of one kind or another, will easily accomplish what is sought for. But suppose the girl to live, and at seven or eight years of age

* The principal sources of information for this Article have been the publications of the Societies named within it.

to be married to a boy, perhaps a year or two older than herself; she enters his house, in a year or two more, to live in a labyrinth of dark passages, small damp apartments and dirty enclosures, from out which many wives never pass, but are confined to the same rooms, sometimes for forty years or more, without the sight of sun or moon, or outward face of nature. "When I teach in one house," says Miss Brittan, for many years a missionary in India, "I sit upstairs in a little verandah, which is walled all around. Into the verandah a strongly barred window opens, behind which sit the women who are being taught, passing their books and work through the bars. I always think of our Saviour's words, when visiting them, 'I was in prison, and ye came unto me.'' "A woman, whose eyes filled with tears when she saw a flower which was brought her to copy in wool, said: 'Ah, this reminds me of the time when I was a child, for there were others like this in my father's garden, and I have not seen it for so long.' Then, pointing a few yards before her to a high wall covered with dirt and moss, she added, 'That is the only prospect I have had for years.

"Yesterday, I entered a house which was exactly like those I had read of, before I came to India. The babu, or gentleman of the house, had a suite of rooms furnished elegantly, rich carpets, sofas, chairs, beautiful paintings and statuary, with a centre-table covered with vases and curiosities. It really was refreshing to see such beauty and elegance. But alas! I was shown into the woman's apartments and the tears would come to my eyes, notwithstanding my efforts to restrain them. Ah! how sad! The babu spoke English to me and was a gentleman; his wife sat on a dirty mat, which was thrown on a damp stone floor, her hair uncombed, her one article of clothing, a sauree, wretchedly dirty, and the appearance of everything in the bare, miserable little room she lived in was that of lowest heathenism. As I saw no chair, I sat down on the mat beside the woman, until a servant brought me one, which he said the babu had sent me."

In the house which she has entered, a new bride is constantly watched by mother-in-law and aunts. She has little opportunity of solitude with her husband; within a few years she may be obliged to share her rights with some hated rival;

at best her life is a continual struggle. Under such surroundings children grow up to hate each other-strife and quarreling among them is the rule of the day; in old age, if the mother come to that, her own ungoverned passion has done its utmost upon her, and has usually effaced from both heart and countenance everything that is lovely. The husband, if he survive her, is not slow to manifest the contempt he had come to feel for her, the satisfaction he has in being released from such a companion. Ask him, then, why he neglects to shave his beard, and he may answer, "Will I shave, when I have lost an old shoe?"

And yet, however bad the condition of the Hindu wife, that of the Hindu widow is worse. Condemned to a perpetual widowhood, she is treated as a slave, is surrounded with the grossest immorality, and in multitudes of cases is murdered by poison. Indeed, of woman generally, the law of Menu declares that she has no business with the texts of the Vedas, the writings of her religion. No sacrifice or religious rite is permitted to her apart from her husband, and Menu classes her with the stupid, the dumb, the blind, and the deaf. The whole existence of woman, in this great empire, is utterly insignificant and debased. In a group of forty, whom Miss Brittan was instructing, not one even knew she had a soul.

So in China, with one hundred and fifty millions of women, the position of the sex is so pitiable that their most earnest prayer through life is, that they may be men in the next state of their existence. In many families, girls have no individual names, but are called Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4. If married, they are simply Mr. So-and-So's wife; if they have sons, they are such and such a boy's mother. In a single Chinese city four thousand female infants are yearly murdered by their parents, according to the statistics of resident missionaries, notwithstanding the contrary averments of Mr. Medhurst in his recent volume, The Foreigner in Far Cathay. For the most part the women go very little out of their filthy and comfortless houses; they herd in these with pigs and other animals; myriads of them are laboring for less than two cents per diem, and opium smoking has widely deadened their mental and moral powers.

All through the Turkish Empire, moreover, girls are never

counted as children by their fathers. The women are far more ignorant, bigoted, priest-ridden than the men; kept from booklearning, that they may labor outside the house as well as in it; forbidden to speak aloud, for a year after marriage, in the presence of their mothers-in-law; lodging often with animals; training their children in every superstition; in some places not allowed to enter the temples before they have given birth to two infants; devoid of purity; shut in vast numbers within their dwellings, from one year to another; themselves the greatest hindrances to the prevalence of better things, they drag out their miserable days; and all this by millions.

In Burmah, Persia, Siam, Ceylon, wherever Christian influence does not dominate-signally, also, in Africa-the same wretchedness prevails among women. The relations of the sexes to manual labor are the opposite of those which obtain in Christian countries, an evidence of the last stage of woman's degradation, for nothing can be more significant than this in settling her mental, spiritual, and social status.

Then, it is to be remembered, that in all these countries, as elsewhere, women beyond men are the shaping factors in human society. However some who read this statement may regard it, no truth is better known to those familiar with the facts. Says a missionary of great experience in India: "There is an impression that the Brahmin woman is a down-trodden slave. She is degraded, but not so much in physical degradation as in the tearing up all womanly instinct, and in imprisoning her, while the husband holds the key as her inhuman jailor. Yet though she is shut up, she is omnipotent within. The breadth of her influence diminishes, but it becomes intensified in power. As soon as a little child begins to lisp, it is taught the name of its patron deity; when it can understand, it is taught the legends of that god, often diabolical, always depraving. So the moral poison is poured into its soul by the mother, until it grows up a firm idolater, a believer in all heathen superstition, and prepared to fight for it in its foulest forms."

Another missionary, in Hindustan, declares: "I find that little permanent impression can be made on the masses, unless woman's influence is brought to bear. The power of native mothers on the boy of five, and the man of fifty, recalls the

remark of the Jesuit in Europe, when it was said that few men attended the churches: 'Oh! we do not care; we have the women, and through them we work both on men and children.'" Enlightened natives in India say: "Thousands of our young men here are Christians in head-belief, but the affections of our hearts prevent an open profession of this faith. Were we to do this, we should become outcasts from our homes, be cursed by our wives, and our little ones be taught to hate us; it is our women who keep up Hinduism by their bigotry and ignorance." Very pertinent and forcible, in this connection, is the testimony of the late William H. Seward, in his Travels Around the World. "The remedy for India is and can be nothing less than a regeneration of the Hindu mind. . The work of regeneration must indeed be slow, for it requires nothing less than the destruction of caste, the restoration of woman, and the conversion of the natives, if not to Christianity, at least to a religion more rational and practical than the Brahminical faith."

Equally great, however, with the degradation of women in these regions of the earth, has been the difficulty of access to them by any who would help them. Especially has this been always true in India and in the Turkish Empire. Male missionaries could not approach the women on any pretext whatever. "It is utterly impossible," says the Eighth Annual Report of the Woman's Union Missionary Society, "for a male preacher to make any attempt for the culture of women." A missionary of experience, after detailing some of the sorrows to which women are born in the Chinese Empire, adds: "In China, we must have native female agency. Missionaries might labor for thirty years in a place, and the women would never hear of Jesus." Many and many a time even missionary ladies have made the attempt to reach them, only to be repulsed. Miss Fidelia Fiske's wonderful work among Nestorian girls, narrated in that charming book, "Woman and her Saviour in Persia," was wholly exceptional, and among a people comparatively few in number-a work in the main, too, confined to youth. In Turkey, India, and China, where is, in our day, the especial struggle between the old and the new, three-fourths of the women have been thoroughly sealed against any influence from without their own houses, until the last few years.