The reader who has already learned from an earlier chapter of this book how frequently women figure in the law-courts, will perhaps be prepared for a not too flattering description of Chinese womankind as represented in the leased Territory. If the litigious and quarrelsome females were typical specimens of their sex it would indeed be difficult to utter a word of truthful praise for the women of Weihaiwei. But it is only fair to remember that it is just the turbulent and masterful females that chiefly come within a British magistrate's range of experience. Chaste and filial daughters, gentle and companionable wives, brave and devoted mothers, bring happiness to multitudes of cottage homes and are to be found in every village; but they seldom come under the official notice of the authorities. Women in Weihaiwei are, indeed, ignorant of nearly everything that is generally implied by education; they are handicapped from childhood by the thoroughly bad old custom of foot-binding; they know nothing of the world beyond the limits of their own group of villages: yet the lives they lead are probably, as a rule, happy, honourable and useful. The Chinese suppose that a woman's proper sphere is the management of the household affairs and the upbringing of her children: and Chinese women seem as a rule to acquiesce willingly and cheerfully in their lot as thus defined. The woman's position as wife and mother is a highly honourable one: filial piety--the cardinal Chinese virtue--is owed to the mother as much as to the father, and the usual sacrificial rites are conducted in honour of the maternal as well as the paternal ancestors of the family. From prehistoric times the dignity of the mother has been regarded in China as hardly inferior to that of the father,[158] subject of course to the father's headship of the family. It would be a great mistake to suppose that Chinese women are brutally or tyrannically treated by their husbands. That cases of ill-treatment of women are sometimes met with is undoubted, but as a rule the tyrant is not the husband but some female member of the husband's family. Mothers-in-law are the domestic tyrants of rural China. Besides treating the wife with severity they often place the husband in a most unhappy dilemma.