"There the royal courts consider a multitude of wives essential to their grandeur, and the nobles reckon their wealth by the number of their wives and cows. The glory of a prince is that of a cock in a barn-yard or of a bull at the head of a herd. Such is their ideal from the King of Dahomey with his bodyguard of Amazons to the Sultan of Morocco and the Khedive of Egypt. Not only do the Mahommedans of Asia continue the practice--they have tried to transplant their ideal paradise into Europe. Turkey, decayed and rotten, with its black eunuchs and its Circassian slave girls, stands as an object-lesson to the whole world." "We beg your pardon, we know enough about Asia; but what of America--does polygamy flourish there?" "It did exist among the Peruvians and Aztecs before the Spanish conquest, but it is now under ban in every country from pole to pole. Witness the Mormons of Utah! They were refused admission into the American Union as long as they adhered to the Oriental type of plural marriage." "Ah! We perceive you are pointing to the Mormons as a warning to us. You mean that we shall not be admitted into the society of the more civilised nations [Page 297] as long as we hold to polygamy. Well! Our own sages have condemned it. It has a long and shameful record; but its days are numbered. It will do doubt be suppressed by our new code of laws." This imaginary conversation is so nearly a transcript of what must have taken place, that I feel tempted to throw the following paragraphs into the form of a dialogue. The dialogue, however, is unavoidably prolix, and I hasten to wind up the discussion. With reference to the Mormons I may add that at the conference on International Arbitration held at Lake Mohonk last July, there were present Jews, Quakers, Protestants and Roman Catholics, but no Mormons and no Turks. Creeds were not required as credentials, but Turk and Mormon did not think it worth while to knock at the door. Both are objects of contempt, and no nation whose family life is formed on the same model can hope to be admitted to full fraternity with Western peoples. The abominations associated with such a type of society are inconsistent with any but a low grade of civilisation--they are eunuchs, slavery, unnatural vice, and, more than all, a general debasement of the female sex. In Chinese society, woman occupies a shaded hemisphere--not inaptly represented by the dark portion in their national symbol the _Yinyang-tse_ or Diagram of the Dual principles. So completely has she hitherto been excluded from the benefits of education that a young man in a native high school recently began an essay with the exclamation--"I am glad I am not a Chinese woman. Scarcely one in a thousand is able to read!"