A Chinese husband can repudiate his wife for adultery, sterility, immodesty, disobedience to her father and mother or to him, loquacity or propensity to slander, inclination to theft, a jealous disposition, or an incurable malady. These motives, however, no longer suffice when the wife has worn mourning for her father-in-law or her mother-in-law; when the family has become rich in comparison with its former poverty; and lastly, when the wife has no longer a father or mother to receive her. If, heedless of these interdictions, the husband repudiates his wife all the same, he becomes liable to receive eighty strokes of bamboo, and must take her back.[783] To the husband alone belongs the right of repudiation, but the law admits divorce by mutual consent. On the other hand, it has taken good care to consecrate the servitude of the wife by ordering that if she flees from the conjugal abode when the husband refuses a divorce, she shall be punished by a hundred strokes of bamboo, and may be sold by her husband to any one willing to marry her.[784] Chinese legislation absolutely refuses the “right of insurrection” to the wife, which the Kabyle _Kanouns_, rigorous as they are to women, have granted. For divorce, as for everything else, China is at the stage of mitigated or humane barbarism. The foundation of her laws has remained savage, but a less ancient spirit has attempted to modify their severity. It has limited the right of repudiation, at first in the power of the master; it has specified the impediments; lastly, it has sanctioned divorce by mutual consent, which still terrifies our legislators. Ancient India had also left the right of repudiation to the husband, but she had no place for divorce in her legislation, and had imposed no restriction on the good pleasure of the husband if there existed one of the cases enumerated by the Code:--“A wife given to intoxicating liquors, having bad morals, given to contradicting her husband, attacked with an incurable disease, as leprosy, or who has been spendthrift of his wealth, ought to be replaced by another.” “A sterile wife ought to be replaced in the eighth year; the wife whose children are all dead, in the tenth year; the wife who only bears daughters, in the eleventh; the wife who speaks with bitterness, instantly.”[785] “For one whole year let a husband bear with the aversion of his wife; but after a year, if she continues to hate him, let him take what she possesses, only giving her enough to clothe and feed her, and let him cease to cohabit with her.”[786]