The daily morning journal and courier., 1903-04-04
"CHRISTOPHOBIA" IN CHINA
AN ATTEMPT TO EXPLAIN THE
 OPPOSITION
To the chr,..,an m,..lonarls. There.

Major-General Adna R. Chaffee, Uni ; ted States army, rather startled the :; members of the Methodist Social Union in this city the other day when he told them that he had never met an ntelll- ] gent Chinaman who expressed any de- i sire to embrace the Christian religion. Of course the generals statement that he never met any such may be accept ed as true, without at all detractlng from the fact that many intelligent Chinamen have embraced the Christian religion under the influence of Amerl- can missionaries. Nevertheless, the Generals statement lends interest to an article upon Chinese Dislike of Christianity" which Francis H, Nich- l ols wrote not long ago for 'fhe Atian- ] tic Monthly" 1 T have met foreigners who have lived in China for the greater part Of their lives, and who had never put 1 themselves in John Chnaman's place, l says MT. Nichols.
 | They had never looked at anything
 from his point of view. They had neV-
 CT listened to his reason for anything
 And these were the men who believed that nothing good could come from 1 Chinaman, although they knew h ml
 very we'll It is like the old story of the
 relative advantages of being man ana
 dog The question can never be an-
 swered satisfactorily, because we shall probably never have an opportunity or
 hearing the dogs side. But we could
 hear the Chinaman's side. He could tell us why he thinks and acts and De- lieves as he does if we would ask him
 'Why?' Yet that is just what has neV-
 CT been done. The black haired people are ridiculed and patronized and de- nounced, but never reasoned Wfth' ana
 until they are we shall continue to mis- judge them just as they misjudge us.
 These reasons that are the springs of action are often fallacies. Supersti- tion and a complacent ignorance some
 times play a prominent part in them
 But just as in the march of all ciVlE- cations fallacies have been overthrown
 only by attacking the ideas on Which
 they were founded, so we can never
 hope to modernize the Chinese until we meet them on their own ground and
 successfully controvert their reasons.
 Probably no Chinese custom or ir-
 stitution has been the object of more
 denunciation and shuddering than the
 practice of binding the feet of the wo-
 men, Per SC, 1t undoubtedly merits all
 the condemnation it receives. It cer-
 tainly is cruel, barborous and degrad-
 ing. The inference usually drawn from
 it is that a parent who would thus de-
 liberately cripple his daughter for life
 can be little less than savage. Yet It
 is safe to say that of the thousands of
 Americans who have heard of foot
 binding. not one in ten has clear idea
 of the Chinese reason for the torture
 For foot binding has it's reason. It
 is only practical application of the
 theory that 'woman's sphere is the . home a belief that is by no means con-
 fined to China but W which in less active form prevails to a very large extent Tn , the United States. The premise once 3 admitted, it becomes the duty of all re- spectabla citizens to devise some means of permanently preventing women from escaping from their sphere. other Oriental nations who hold in practi ] cal form the same belief as the Chinese , make prisoners of their women They . hide them in their homes and compel them to appear yelled in the street AS |. q different means of accomplishing the 5 same end the Chinese make 1t physi- [ cally impossible for a woman to walk far from home. Pounded on the simple l principle that every good woman's . life is spent within certain narrow linn 7 it's. foot binding has become uniVer' sal custom which can be transgressec !. only by the lifelong disgrace of the wo'
 man whose feet are allowed to remalr
 in a natural condition. I firmly be f lieve that the Chinese appreciate tho @ cruelties of foot binding quite as muct V as we do.
 :, "A woman leading little girl passed v by the inn where we were resting ont d afternoon. On the child's drawn fact d were depicted some of the agonie' ,. which the bandages on her legs were = causing her. One of the soldiers or mN = escort sprang up, and, taking the chilt = in his arms, carried her to her home, = quarter of mile down the road
 d ".It must be terrible to be woman, s he said to me as he re-entered th g kung kwan courtyard.
 y Several educated men with whom - have talked of the practice in Shens g agreed with me as to it's cruelty. The. If all regretted it as a painful necessity
 Their argument against it's discontinu l. ance was always, How else can wo '- men be made to stay at home"
 If, instead of merely huddering a
 foot binding and of calling the Chimes E unpleasant names for persisting in tn
 practice, the advantages of all enlight
 ened idea of womanhood could be de e monstrated to them; if the majority o d parents could be persuaded that thei r daughters were capable of living i if other spheres than home-if the reaso st could be annihilated, believe that foe q binding might decline in popularity J. and might ultimately disappear. Sue : a course would at least be interestin Is as an experiment that has heretofor
 never been tried in attacking any Chi h Inese institution or belief.