If this belief produces unfortunate social consequences, it at the same time serves to consolidate family ties; but ever so it is pernicious, especially with respect to the condition of women. The lot of Chinese women is certainly not a happy one. Lodging rather than living with her husband, under his parents’ roof, the young wife is never allowed to see her own family, excepting at certain fixed periods prearranged by custom. In their earlier years married women in China are exposed to the caprices and rebuffs of a shrewish mother-in-law, who is the tyrant of the family, and whose humble servants the daughters-in-law are expected to be. For all this, they enjoy a certain amount of liberty, for they are neither cloistered nor veiled; but they very rarely leave their house, a state of semi-seclusion which does not prevent their morals being often very indifferent. ‘In a district near mine,’ an American missionary at Fo-kien assured me, ‘there are very few husbands who are not deceived by their wives; and in the one which is under my direction the state of morality, or rather of immorality, is pretty nearly the same.’ Theoretically speaking, adultery in a Chinese woman is considered a very grave crime. As for the husband, he is not expected to practise fidelity. The average Chinaman delights in obscenity, and revels in improper stories and jests; and when he has a little money to spare, spends it very freely in the loosest company. Those places of entertainment where Venus reigns supreme are not, as in Japan, situated in the best and most brilliantly lighted quarter of the town, for such of my readers who have visited Canton may possibly remember to have had pointed out to them the ‘flower-boats’—floating constructions two stories high, whose internal decorations are of the most magnificent. The national vice of the Chinese, however, is gambling, and it is one very few of them can resist. In his interesting monograph on Peking, Mgr. Favier tells us how the beggars in rags will stake their last scrap of clothing. Certain fanatics will stake their wives and children, and men have been known to wager away their finger-joints. A young Christian, who was an inveterate gambler, on one occasion staked and lost his wife, who was only twenty years of age, for the large sum of 15s. The missionary paid the debt and returned the young woman to her mother. A few months afterwards she rejoined her husband, and, adds the author, with the authority of his thirty-eight years of missionary life in China, ‘in all probability he has staked and lost her again.’