"Suffering, privation, contempt, all kinds of misery and degradation, seize on her in the cradle, and accompany her to the tomb. Her birth is commonly regarded as a humiliation and a disgrace to the family--an evident sign of the malediction of heaven. If she be not immediately suffocated, a girl is regarded and treated as a creature radically despicable, and scarcely belonging to the human race." He adds that if a bridegroom dies, the most honorable course for the bride is to commit suicide. Even the Japanese, so highly civilized in some respects, look down on women with unfeigned contempt, likening themselves to heaven and the women to earth. There are ten stations on the way up the sacred mount Fuji. Formerly no woman was allowed to climb above the eighth. Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain, of the University of Tokyo, has a foot-note in his _Things Japanese_ (274) in which he relates that in the introduction to his translation of the _Kojiki_ he had drawn attention to the inferior place held by women in ancient as in modern Japan. Some years afterward six of the chief literati of the old school translated this introduction into Japanese. They patted the author on the head for many things, but when they reached the observation anent the subjection of women, their wrath exploded: "The subordination of women to men," so ran their commentary, "is an extremely correct custom. To think the contrary is to harbor European prejudice.... For the man to take precedence over the woman is the grand law of heaven and earth. To ignore this, and to talk of the contrary as barbarous, is absurd." The way in which these kind, gentle, and pretty women are treated by the men, Chamberlain says on another page, "has hitherto been such as might cause a pang to any generous European heart.... At the present moment the greatest duchess or marchioness in the land is still her husband's drudge. She fetches and carries for him, bows down humbly in the hall when my lord sallies forth on his walks abroad, waits upon him at meals, may be divorced at his good pleasure."