Inspired by profound pity for these poor creatures, these excellent ladies started a Refuge for them with a receiving-house in the very midst of this locality of ill-fame. To this haven the poor things often flee even in the middle of the night, facing the unknown, undeterred by rumours of the evil intentions of the foreigners put about by their owners, rather than endure longer the life of degradation and misery to which they have been condemned. The missionaries receive them and pass them on to the "Door of Hope," the appropriately named Refuge, which restores them to hope and peace and happiness. There were to be seen some eighty young women living a hard-working simple life, contented and merry, and apparently never regretting for one moment the fine clothes and lazy luxury which many of them had renounced. The ladies teach them useful arts, instruct them in Christianity, and fit them for wives to Chinese Christians who will be good to them, and, understanding well that their former life was involuntary, are glad to have wives with a modicum of education. The ladies will allow non-Christians to mate with non-Christians, if of good character; but they will not permit any of their rescued flock to become secondary wives. {135} Two things are remarkable in this work of almost divine compassion--a relapse is practically unknown; and it is the Chinese who are most helpful in encouraging it--more so than foreigners; the Chinese often themselves suggest the "Door of Hope" to these girls, and help in police cases to save them from their brutal owners. The risk that China runs at this moment in the home-life is the same as the risk that she is running in every other department of her national existence. If the materialist side of Western civilisation is the one that is the most apparent, it is scarcely possible that it will fail to do great damage to her home-life. A thoughtful Chinaman, talking about the whole question, argued in favour of a complete acceptance of Western ideas. He was afraid of a half measure. He said that there was no question that women in the West are restrained by a mass of conventions of whose value they are perhaps unconscious, but which are very apparent to those who have been brought up in a different civilisation. It is the existence of these conventions that makes their liberty possible. If the Chinese are to accept Western civilisation for their women, and he regarded this as inevitable, they must learn the conventions; and therefore his solution to the problem was that Chinese girls should be brought to England and brought up as English girls. But many missionaries plead for the opposite policy. They say: "Let us preserve what is good in the Chinese home-life, let Christianity permeate {136} that life and make it beautiful, but do not destroy it. The Chinese home-life fits the Chinese race. The Westernised Chinawoman will combine the errors of both civilisations and the virtues of neither."