when she desires to exclude her lord and master from the harem, a pair of shoes placed at the door, implying that there are visitors within, is usually a sufficient bar to his entrance. The mother is treated by her children with the greatest respect and defer ence, even when they are grown up, or it might be more correct to say, especially when they are grown up and are able to understand their duty. Grown up sons, even when they are married, do not sit in the presence of their mother without permis sion. ... It is usual to find among well-to-do people married sons living with their parents, or with their widowed mother. In such cases the mother is boss of the whole concern. The young wife, or each wife, if there is more than one, has her own private apartments in the establishment, where she is mistress, and in some cases her own servants and slaves, but over all the mother-in-law presides, often with an iron rule; and if she is a widow she is supreme indeed; her husband being dead, there is no one to gainsay her." (Mrs. W. M. Ramsay, Every Day Life in Turkey.) As a recent writer says: "As to personal and proprietary rights a Turkish woman occupies a not unenviable position. As a daughter she is entitled, on the death of her father, to inherit his property in common with her brothers in a proportion deter mined by law according to the number of his children. As a wife she has the uncon trolled possession both of the fortune of which she may be possessed before mar riage, and of any wealth that may subse quently accrue to her. She can inherit landed property without the intervention of trustees, and bequeath it at her death to whom she will. No doctrine of coverture exists for her; she can sue in the courts, or be sued, independently of her husband, and can also sue him, or be sued by him. She is also entitled to plead her own cause before the public tribunals, which she often does most ably and eloquently. A husband is, on
the other hand, bound to support his wife and her slaves or servants according to their rank and his means, and to furnish her with a suitable residence to be solely and exclu sively appropriated to her." (L. M. J. Garnett, Women in Turkey, The Cosmopolitan, July, 1900.) The Koran says the husband may divorce his wife without assigning any reason or giving any notice; he may rebuke, imprison and scourge her. He may twice divorce and twice take back the sanie woman, but if he a third time divorce her, she cannot again become his wife until she has married and been divorced from some other man. (Sura. 11,230.) Yet Ibrahim Halebi says: "In the absence of serious reasons no Mussulman can justify divorce in the eyes either of religion or the law. If he abandon his wife, or put her away from simple caprice, he draws down upon himself the divine anger, for 'the curse of God,' said the Prophet, 'rests upon him who repudiates his wife capriciously.' " Practically, however, a Mo hammedan may, whenever he pleases, with out assigning any reason, say to his wife, "Thou art divorced, and she must then return to her parents. (Amir' Ali. Personal Law of Mohammedans, 332; Lane, Modern Egyptians, I, 150, 247.) Among most of the Mohammedan peo ples divorces are very frequent. According to Dr. Van der Berg, an even more fatal influence is exercised on family life in the East by this laxity of the marriage tie than by polygamy. In Cairo, according to Lane, there are not many men who have not divorced one wife, if they have been married for a long time; and many men in Egypt have in the course of two years married as many as twenty, thirty or more wives; whilst there are women advanced in age who have been wives to a dozen or more men successively. In Morocco, a man repudiates his wife on the slightest provocation and marries again. Among the Moors of the Sahara it is considered "low" for a couple to
