[Illustration: WOMAN'S NATURAL FOOT, AND ANOTHER WOMAN'S FEET BOUND TO 6 INCHES. _By Dr. E. Garner._]
[Illustration: WOMAN'S NATURAL FOOT, AND ANOTHER WOMAN'S FEET BOUND TO 4½ INCHES. _By Dr. E. Garner._]
The Chinese saying is, "For each pair of bound feet there has been a whole _kang_, or big bath, full of tears"; and they say that one girl out of ten dies of footbinding or its after-effects. When I quoted this to the Italian Mother Superior at Hankow, who has for years been head of the great Girls' School and Foundling Establishment there, she said, with tears in her eyes, "Oh no, no! that may be true of the coast towns." I thought she was going to say it would be a gross exaggeration in Central China; but to my horror she went on, "But more here--more--more." Few people could be in a better position to judge than herself; for until this year the little girls under her charge have regularly had their feet bound. As I have understood, there the bandages were only tightened once a week. The children were, of course, exempted from all lessons on those days; and the Italian Sister who had to be present suffered so much from witnessing the little girls' sufferings that she had to be continually changed, no Italian woman being able to endure the pain of it week after week. Of course, the only reason they bound the children's feet was from anxiety about finding husbands for them in after-life, and from fear of parents not confiding their children to them unless they so far conformed to Chinese custom. But this year the good Mother has at last decided that public opinion has been sufficiently developed to make it possible for her to dispense with these hateful bandages. "Do you suppose I like them?" she said, the last time I saw her. "Always this question of new shoes of different sizes, according as the feet are made smaller; always more cotton-cloth being torn into bandages: the trouble it all entails is endless--simply endless." This was a point of view I had never considered. But it is a comfort to think the good Mother is delivered from it; for she wrote to me in the spring of 1898 that she knew I should be glad to hear fifty little girls had just been unbound, and no more girls were to have their feet bound under her care.