that the rigid binding and forcing back of the feet was largely a
thing of the past. China, with other nations, has come to regard that
practice as barbarous, but the small feet, those that enable a woman
to walk a little and do not inconvenience her in getting about the
house, are still favoured by the Chinese ladies."

The custom of binding and destroying the feet, no doubt, arose from
the low views entained by Chinese sages concerning woman, and from
a lack of confidence in her sense of honour and virtue. She must be
maimed so that she cannot go about at will, so she shall be completely
under the eye of her husband, held as it were in fetters. It is a sad
comment on Chinese domestic morality, it fosters the very evil it
seeks to cure, it destroys all home life in the best sense. The veiled
women of the East are very much in the same position. If a stranger,
out of curiosity or by accident, look on the face of a Mohammedan
wife, it might lead to her repudiation by her jealous husband, or the
offender might be punished for his innocent glance. The writer recalls
how at Hebron, in Palestine, he was cautioned by the dragoman, when
going up a narrow street to the Mosque of Machpelah, where he had to
pass veiled women, not to look at them or to seem to notice them,
as the men were very fanatical and might do violence to an unwary
tourist. The Chinese women of small feet, or rather no feet at all,
walk, or attempt to walk, in a peculiar way. It is as if one were on
stilts. The feet are nothing but stumps, while the ankles are large,
almost unnatural in their development. It is indeed a great deformity.
The feet are shrunken to less size than an infant's; but they have not
the beauty of a baby's feet, which have in them great possibilities
and a world of suggestion and romance and poetry. If the Chinese
custom had prevailed among the ancient Hebrew people, think you that
King Solomon in singing of the graces of the Shulamite, who represents