met by the retort, "Men have no business to meddle with women's
affairs."

McLennan ventures the opinion that the practice of abortion so widely
noted among Indians in the Western Hemisphere, "must have supervened
on a practice of infanticide."

Similar practices have been found to prevail wherever historians have
dug deep into the life of savage people. Infanticide, at least, was
practiced by African tribes, by the primitive peoples of Japan, India
and Western Europe, as well as in China, and in early Greece and Rome.
The ancient Hebrews are sometimes pointed out as the one possible
exception to this practice, because the Mosaic law, as it has come
down to us, is silent upon the subject. Westermark is of the opinion
that it "hardly occurred among the Hebrews in historic times. But we
have reason to believe that at an earlier period, among them, as among
other branches of the Semitic race, child murder was frequently
practiced as a sacrificial rite."

Westermark found that "the murder of female infants, whether by the
direct employment of homicidal means, or exposure to privation and
neglect, has for ages been a common practice or even a genuine custom
among various Hindu castes."

Still further light is shed upon the real sources of the practice, as
well as upon the improvement of the status of woman through the
practice, by an English student of conditions in India. Captain S.
Charles MacPherson, of the Madras Army, in the Journal of the Royal
Asiatic Society for 1852, said: "I can here but very briefly advert to
the customs and feelings which the practice of infanticide (among the