Among the Lao, where marriage is much more honored and considered more sacred than in many other countries, the boys are freer to do their courting in person, and both boys and girls have far more voice in the selection of a life partner than in countries where women live in seclusion and where polygamy abounds. [Sidenote: The burden of motherhood.] Through long years there has run in my ears the brief story of a Christian servant in one of the missionary homes in Persia. “I was married at twelve years and had a baby when I was thirteen, and, oh! how glad I was when it died!” Glad? Of course she was glad. What child of thirteen would want the burden of motherhood? Who of us who has witnessed the agonies of the little dying child-mother can ever for a moment think with carelessness or indifference of the awful custom of child marriage? [Sidenote: A dying child-wife.] “A girl of fifteen was dying,” writes a friend from India. “Her husband, a man of fifty or more, is a man of good position and considerable means. The girl lay in a bare room with nothing but an unbaked earthenware vessel near her. Her _second_ baby had been born a few days or weeks before and something was wrong.... But she was a purdah woman and could not see the doctor. He had asked a few questions from outside and had diagnosed the illness as tuberculosis, was treating it as such,--and had given it as his opinion that she would die. Our pastor’s wife, dear Mrs. Roy, had somehow gone to see her. Even her non-professional eye saw that a mistake had been made, and she tried to persuade the mother to send for a woman doctor. ‘What was the use? She was doing to die.’ “Mrs. Roy expostulated indignantly with the mother for having married this child of twelve to a grown-up man, just for money. The poor child seemed so sad. Mrs. Roy told her of the Christian’s hope and a Saviour’s love. The child listened with the tears running down her face. Then she asked, ‘May I touch you?’ (Being a mother of a few days she was still unclean and no one would touch her). So Mrs. Roy went to her and held her hands and stroked her face and hair and tried to give her comfort for the journey for which she was so little prepared. Thus is the ‘hope of India’ MURDERED by custom and carelessness and greed. _Oh, India is horrible!_” [Sidenote: Statistics from India. Child-marriage; Child-widowhood.] From the _Missionary Review of the World_ (August, 1911) we quote the following statistics, each word and figure of which cries out to us Christian women, “How long, oh, how long, shall these things be?”