“The province of Fuhkien,” says Douglas, “is that in which this crime most obtains. Inquiries show that in many districts as large a portion as one fourth of the female children born are destroyed at birth. At Pekin, on the other hand, it cannot be said to exist at all. But in this as in so many social offences in China, the sword of the law, which is alone capable of putting down crime, is allowed to hang like a rusty weapon on the wall. It is true that occasionally proclamations are issued in which the heinousness of the evil is explained with all the impressiveness that could be desired, but so long as natural affection finds no support from without it will continue, in China, to yield to the requirements of daily food.”[96] [Illustration: AN OVERBURDENED CHINESE CHILD CARRYING MORE THAN HIS WEIGHT IN TEA (COPYRIGHT BY UNDERWOOD & UNDERWOOD, N. Y.)] [Illustration: “LITTLE MOTHERS”—THE ONE FIVE, THE OTHER EIGHT, YEARS OLD—CHINA] “The custom of infanticide,” wrote Professor Krausse, “is one which has obtained in many parts of China for ages. It does not, as a rule, take the form of actual murder, but consists rather in assisting the laws of Nature. Thus an infant will be neglected and permitted to perish, or if it sicken, will be put aside and allowed to take its chance.”[97] “Outside the wall [of Wie Hsien],” writes A. J. Brown, “we saw a ‘Baby House,’ a small stone building in which dead children of the poor are thrown to be eaten by dogs! “I wanted to examine it, but was warned not to do so as the Chinese imagine that foreigners make their medicine out of children’s eyes and brains, and our crowds of watching Chinese might quickly become an infuriated mob.”[98] In the face of all this one reads with interest in a book by a professor of Chinese in the University of Cambridge that: “Among other atrocious libels which have fastened upon the fair name of the Chinese people, first and foremost stands the charge of female infanticide, now happily, though still slowly, fading from the calculations of those who seek the truth.”[99] CHAPTER V DEATH BY NEGLECT AND SACRIFICE IN JAPAN—THE NEW-BORN TABOO—MYTH OF THE EXPOSURE OF THE CHILD OF THE GODS—GROWTH OF THE MARRIAGE CUSTOM—THE ARRIVAL OF THE CHINESE—MODERN CANNIBALISM—MODERN LAWS ON THE SALE OF CHILDREN. The first inhabitants of Japan were a numerous people named Koropok-guru, who lived in conelike huts built over holes dug in the earth and who were exterminated by the Ainu people. The latter were in turn conquered by the race that we speak of today as the Japanese; these last settlers coming to the islands of Japan from somewhere in the north of Central Asia, while a second stream of South Asian immigrants were drifted to Japan by the Japan current.