"Some of these poor little creatures are brought here alive and left to die, and some of these have been rescued and carried to foundling hospitals. The neighbourhood was so pestiferous that we could only pause a moment to look at 'an institution' which, although so horrible, is so characteristic of this race, who pay such unbounded reverence to the powerful dead who could harm them. Most of the bodies deposited here are those of girl babies who have been intentionally put to death, but older children are often thrown in."
With regard to this, I will only say that I lived all together for over four years within a mile or so of these Towers, which I frequently passed during the evening walk; and so far from ever seeing "several poor uncoffined mites lying outside the towers, shrouded only in a morsel of old matting," which Miss Gordon Cumming has described, I never even saw one single instance of a tower being put to the purpose for which it was built, viz.: as a burying-place for the dead infants of people too poor to spend money upon a grave. As for living children being thrown in, I think I shall be able to dispose of that statement a little later on. Miss Gordon Cumming did not add that these towers are cleared out at regular intervals by a Chinese charitable society which exists for that purpose, the bodies burnt, and the ashes reverently buried.
Mrs. Bird-Bishop, the traveller, is reported to have stated at a public lecture in 1897, that "one of the most distressing features of Chinese life was the contempt for women. Of eleven Bible-women whom she had seen at a meeting in China, there was not one who had not put an end to at least five girl-babies."
A Jesuit missionary has published a quarto volume, running to more than 270 pages, and containing many illustrations of infanticide, and the judgments of Heaven which always come upon those who commit this crime.
Finally, if you ask of any Chinaman, he will infallibly tell you that infanticide exists to an enormous extent everywhere in China; and as though in corroboration of his words, alongside many a pool in South China may be found a stone tablet bearing an inscription to the effect that "Female children may not be drowned here." This would appear to end the discussion; but it does not.