One mother, a widow with four children dependent on her, told me, with tears streaming down her face, how she had tried to throw away the skeleton-like little baby she carried in her arms, but she said the child always found its way back to her, and she added, “It is not easy to give one’s own child away.” She said she felt sometimes she would just have to drink poison, and put an end to her miserable existence, and one of the others asked her what would become of her children if she did that, and she said, with despair in every feature, “Don’t ask me.”[10] In a later chapter we shall learn of what is being done through Christian orphanages for many little famine waifs and the orphans of those killed in battle and massacre, but, when we consider the untold harm to body and mind that has befallen these children before help reaches them, we realize that we must hereafter work with heart and soul at the task of _prevention_ of these great evils if we believe in the welfare of the human race. [Sidenote: Health.] “Health,” we are told by Dr. E. T. Devine, “is influenced by the occupations and habits of growing children; by their play and their attendance at school; by the attention given to their eyesight, hearing, breathing, and digestion, to their spines, and to the arches of their feet, to their position at the desk, and to the type from which their text books are printed; by the readiness with which they make friends and so enter into the natural sports and exercises of childhood; by the development of their self-control, and their more or less unconscious acceptance of standards of conduct and principles of action which will be their ultimate safeguard against those diseases and weaknesses which come from indulgence of wrong appetites and desires.” [Sidenote: Foot-binding.] Judged by these standards, what chances have the children of Asia and Africa and the Pacific Islands for being safeguarded against disease and weakness and death? Consider the one matter of “attention to the arches of their feet” and compare such a standard of health with the age-long custom of foot-binding in China, and what hope is there for perfect, blooming health among the women of China or their children? A full description of the horrible custom of foot-binding may be found in Dr. James S. Dennis’s “Christian Missions and Social Progress” (vol. 1, p. 212). The effects of it upon the little girl victims are thus described by one who has every right to speak on the subject.