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Love of People 193 gift, and to those whose age is over ninety, he should add two extra dishes of special foods. (The extra dishes include rice cakes, fried cakes made of wheat flour, and dried pheasant meat.) Let us think this way. Even if the district is large, the elderly aged above eighty are more or less twenty to thirty, and the ones aged over ninety only a few. Then the rice to be distributed to them will not exceed a couple of sŏk (30 mal), and the meat needed for the same purpose will amount to only 60 catties. An expenditure like this is hardly exorbitant. There are many who waste a large sum of money enjoying a night with entertaining girls and performers. Such immoral behavior antagonizes scholars, as well as the people, and generates intense hatred. The magistrate who dares to act in this way wastes his wealth while gaining wrath and resentment. If the governor hears about it, he will make a negative report in his evaluation of the magistrate , and his children will be ashamed of it, not recording it in his biography after his death. So there is nothing more wasteful and harmful than this. Would that the magistrate separate only half the money he wastes in seeking pleasure and use it to serve the elderly in his district! CHAPTER : FOSTERING ORPHANS The Love of Children Used to Be One of the Important State Affairs of All the Sage Kings. Throughout History They Cultivated and Developed It until It Was Established as the Law. What is called “the love of children” [chayu] means fostering orphans. In every county and district of the Song dynasty there was a public orphanage run by the government. Those who were not able to raise their children on their own because they were extremely poor were allowed to bring them to the orphanage . Then the orphanage raised them, recording their date of birth, and let people who were childless adopt those children if they wanted to. As a result, there were no abandoned children on the street even in years with a poor harvest. A bureau of social service in the Song dynasty called Deshengshe stated in its report on abandoned children: “Because of the damage from the drought following the flood, people are continually dying of hunger and wandering all over the place. From bad to worse, epidemic diseases are so contagious that husbands and wives or parents and children are separated and scattered in all directions. The most miserable scene among what is happening is the abandoned children on the street crying aloud until they are out of breath. What can a traveler do about it except sigh and lament even though he feels very sorry about them? What is more terrible is to see a dead mother hugging in her arms her child still alive, which 194 book IV reminds one of the ghost child of the Lu family. When a hungry father is holding a starving child in his arms, one suspects that he intends to sacrifice his child to save his old mother, as a farmer named Guo did. The children have mouths but do not know how to speak; they have legs but are unable to walk. Hence they are helpless. The situation of these miserable children is really urgent.” Those Who Are in Extreme Poverty Are Incapable of Raising Their Children Even If They Have Them. What the Magistrate Should Do Is to Persuade the Parents Not to Abandon Their Children, Protecting Them as If They Were His Own. When Jia Biao was magistrate of Xinxi, the people of his district were so poor that many of them did not raise their children. To rectify this anomaly, he made the law much stricter, dealing with abandonment of children as homicide. There were two cases that needed to be dealt with. One was a homicide committed by a thief, which happened in the south of the district; the other was the murder of a child by its mother, which happened in the north of the district. When Jia Biao went out to execute the law in these cases, his yamen attendant tried to escort him to the south. Showing indignation, Jia Biao said, “It often happens that a thief harms the people; however, it is defying the way of Heaven and violating humanity that a mother and her children kill each other.” Then he drove his carriage to the north and...

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