The Chinese loved their children and yet infanticide existed with them, but mostly only that of girls. The greatest cause was poverty. Being too poor to care for their children parents thought best to kill them than to sell them into slavery. This perhaps was not large over the whole country and existed to a great extent only in certain parts, sometimes as high as eighty per cent. of all girl babies born. The following conditions as given as found some time before the year 1840, shows its prevalence in certain districts at that time, as this refers to a small village on the Amoy island. "On a second visit, while addressing them, one man held up a child, and publicly acknowledged that he had killed five of the helpless beings, having preserved but two. I thought he was jesting, but as no surprise or dissent was expressed by his neighbors, and as there was an air of simplicity and regret in the individual, there was no reason to doubt its truth. After repeating his confession, he added with affecting simplicity, 'It was before I heard you speak on this subject, I did not know it was wrong; I would not do so now.' Wishing to obtain the testimony of the assembled villages, I put the question publicly, 'What number of female infants in this village are destroyed at birth?' The reply was, 'More than one-half.' As there was no discussion among them, which is not the case when they differ in opinion, and as we were fully convinced from our own observations of the numerical inequality of the sexes, the proportion of deaths they gave did not strike us as extravagant."[82]