the endless wrappings and cerements of a formal and unprogressive religion. The development of the other great Asiatic civilisation, the Chinese, was in many ways remarkable. As in India, the drastic subordination of the women does not seem to be merely a heritage from a barbaric past, since the lower Mongolian tribes generally show little tendency to it. Not only the Indo-Chinese tribes I mentioned in an earlier chapter, but the more northern Mongolians, grant their women much liberty and respect. Huc found the women of Tartary very vigorous and independent; and another early traveller, La Pérouse, found one of the most primitive of Mongolian tribes, in the bay of Castries, with a remarkably good character and a very generous and equable treatment of their women. Almost the only one of the lower Mongolian peoples to treat their women harshly are the Thibetans, and in their case the injustice is mainly confined to Lhassa. In that city a woman cannot go out unless she smears her face with a dark, gluey composition. There, however, the influence of monks and priests clearly explains the anomaly. From this primitive level of comparative equality the Chinese, as they developed their civilisation, passed to a social order in which woman held a very subordinate place. The symbolic representation of capture is so common in Mongolian marriages that one cannot help suspecting that an early capturing of wives may have led to subordination; though one must remember that the symbol occurs in tribes in which woman has great liberty and influence. Whatever the causes may have been, we find woman in a position of abject dependence as soon as literature throws any direct light on Chinese civilisation. It seems to me that the oldest Chinese poetry in the _King_ point to a less unjust _régime_; but we get our first complete knowledge of the social order in the Confucian literature, and there woman is almost, if not quite, as subject as she is to-day. The girl was only too apt to be sold or exposed in infancy by the poor--a practice on which the moralists always frowned, but which the authorities allow even to-day; though there are now generally public hospitals to receive exposed children. The Chinese girl usually marries at about her twentieth year, and, as virginity is essential (except among the poor), she is carefully guarded under the parental roof. At marriage she passes under the power of a husband, whom she must obey in all things. She brings no dowry, inherits no property, and has no right of divorce. The law even discriminates most unjustly between the sexes in its scale of punishments. She has a very slight education--only a few women having, by some domestic accident, figured in the literary chronicles--and not the least knowledge of public affairs. We may well regret that the great moralists of China did not denounce these inequalities. Six centuries before Christ agnostic moralists like