Even in modern times this is so, a midwife who was asked in recent years to become a Christian saying that it was impossible inasmuch as it interfered with her business. She said that frequently she was asked by wealthy people to drown the female children which the parents had not the courage to kill themselves.[90] In 1720 Father d’Entrcolles translated a manual for the use of mandarins which bore the title _The Perfect Happiness of the People_ and which contained a plan for a “House of Pity for homeless infants”[91] and an exhortation to put such a plan into execution, declaring that in times past there had been such institutions for the reception of orphans and homeless children and that nurses had been provided for them when they had been rescued. The next proclamation of which we have any knowledge was that issued with the approval of the Emperor Kien Long, who reigned from 1736 to 1796. In 1772, Ngeou Yang Yun Ki addressed to the Emperor, in the thirty-seventh year and the twenty-ninth day of the tenth moon of his reign, a communication in which it was stated that the poor families had been obliged to drown their daughters because they had not had enough food. Permission was asked to inflict on the person who committed this crime, the penalty of sixty blows from a cane, and a year in exile. In 1773 the Emperor Kien Long himself issued the following edict against infanticide: “The statutes fixing the penalty for the murder of a grown-up child or a small child presuppose that the child has not failed to obey the orders of its parents or grandparents, and cover cases where the infants are murdered deliberately and with premeditation. This crime, which violates the laws of nature, should be punished with the whip and with banishment. If the infants that are thus killed are but newly-born and therefore without intelligence and reason, the guilty cannot plead the disobedience of these daughters as an excuse for their crimes. Therefore henceforth whenever any one following the barbarous custom shall drown his infants, he will be prosecuted for murder with premeditation, and when the proof has been properly established before the proper tribunals he will receive a sentence equal to that which is meted out to the parents or grandparents who voluntarily assassinate their children. It is not necessary to issue a special ordinance. Let all respect this decree.” A dozen years later another voice was raised in protest against the drowning of girls. Chen, Treasurer General of the province of Kiang Sou, presented to the governor of that province a proclamation against infanticide and begged him to publish it. In 1815 a writer named Ou Sing King made an appeal to the officials of China to stop the drowning of infants and the sale of women, and this appeal falling into the hands of the Emperor Kia King, a proclamation was issued against both vices. The writer, Ou Sing King, was given imperial permission to go further in his investigations.