But what did the men say? What they thought of the meeting we did not know; for as the husband of one of the ladies said next day rather crossly, "Oh, of course the women liked it! They don't want to bind their feet!" It seemed a step, however, to have got a Chinaman even to admit that.
At an anti-footbinding meeting another day, when those opposed to binding were asked to stand up, all the men present but six rose to their feet, and a merchant among the audience began a speech against binding. Some days afterwards a mandarin, calling, took up Pastor Kranz's pamphlet lying on the table, and said: "Ah, I have the larger copy of this book with pictures. No, I was not at the meeting the other day, but my people were. As to unbinding, the elder women can't; you see, their toes have dropped off. But my little girl of six is not having her feet bound any more. She screamed out so directly she laid her head upon her pillow, I could not bear to hear it. Besides, she got no sleep." He was a man of means, and made no reference as to any possible difficulty about marrying her.
It was a little later on that we got our first great push forward. One of the examiners at Peking lost his father, and being in mourning could not, in accordance with Chinese usage, continue to hold office, so returned to his home in the far west, and there found his little daughter of seven crying over her footbinding. Whilst on the way he had come across one of our tracts. First he had his child's feet unbound; then he thought, Could not he write something better on the subject--an appeal to his nation that would carry power? After many days of thought, he wrote what we commonly call the Suifu Appeal; for having signed it with his name and seal, and got five of his friends, leading men of the neighbourhood, to add their testimony and names, they proceeded to placard it over the walls of Suifu, against the examinations that were just coming off there, that all the young men might carry back the news of it to the different homes from which they came. No sooner did we get a copy of this pamphlet--which, curiously enough, was brought to me by Mr. Upcraft, then on his way down-river to be married to the very lady who had first told me of the missionaries' efforts against footbinding, and thus impelled me to try to do what a simple lay woman could--than we at once began to reprint and distribute this appeal to all the ten thousand students who were coming up for examination to Chungking. We were more lavish of our funds than they of Suifu, and tried to give each a copy to take home. Then came a letter from the Shanghai manager of the great China Merchants' Company, the one great commercial body of China, also semi-official, saying he heard that there was a wonderful tract in the west, and he would like a copy, that he might reprint it at his own expense, and send it to be circulated through his native province of Kwangtung.