# THE POPULATION OF CHINA
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While so many elements of vitality are in a state of activity for the reproduction and sustenance of the human race, there is probably no part of the world in which the harvests of mortality are more sweeping and destructive than in China, producing voids which require no ordinary appliances to fill up. Multitudes perish absolutely from want of the means of existence; inundations destroy towns and villages and all their inhabitants; it would not be easy to calculate the loss of life by the typhoons or hurricanes which visit the coasts of China, in which boats and junks are sometimes sacrificed by hundreds and by thousands. The late civil wars in China must have led to the loss of millions of lives. The sacrifices of human beings by executions alone are frightful. At the moment in which I write, it is believed that from 400 to 500 victims fall daily by the hands of the headsman in the province of Kwang-tung alone. Reverence for life there is none, as life exists in superfluous abundance. A dead body is an object of so little concern, that it is sometimes not thought worth while to remove it from the spot where it putrefies on the surface of the earth. Often have I seen a corpse under the table of gamblers; often have I trod over a putrid body at the threshold of a door. In many parts of China, there are towers of brick or stone where toothless — principally female children — are thrown by their parents into a hole made in the side of the wall. There are various opinions as to the extent of Infanticide in China, but that it is a common practice in many provinces admits of no doubt. One of the most eloquent Chinese writers against infanticide, Kwei Chung Fu, professes to have been specially inspired by "the God of literature" to call upon the Chinese people to refrain from the inhuman practice, and declares that "the God" had filled his house with honors, and given him literary descendants, as the recompense for his exertions. Yet his denunciations scarcely go further than to pronounce it wicked in those to destroy their female children who have the means of bringing them up; and some of his arguments are strange enough: "To destroy daughters," he says, "is to make war upon heaven's harmony" (in the equal numbers of the sexes): "the more daughters you drown, the more daughters you will have; and never was it known that the drowning of daughters led to the birth of sons." He recommends abandoning children to their fate "on the wayside" as preferable to drowning them, and then says "there are instances of children so exposed...