Among
educated people too, the idea that the other world is closed to
bachelors and childless men has died, although a daughter unmarried
after the age of puberty is still a stigma on the family. Do British
readers realise that in an Indian novel of the middle and upper classes
there can hardly be a bride older than twelve; there can be no love
story of the long wooing and waiting of the lovers?

[Sidenote: Polygamy.]

As regards polygamy, the Census shows 1011 married women for every 1000
married men, so that apparently not more than 11 married men in every
1000 are polygamists. But polygamy is still an Indian institution, in
the sense that it is at the option of any man to have more than one
wife; in the matter of marriage, the rights of man alone are regarded.
All over India, however, among the educated classes, Mahomedans
excepted, public opinion is now requiring a justification for a second
marriage, as, for example, the barrenness, insanity, infirmity, or
misconduct of the first spouse. The temptation of a second dowry is
still, however, operative with men of certain high castes in which
bridegrooms require to be paid for. The writer well remembers the
pitiful comic tale of a struggling brahman student of Bengal, whose home
had been made unhappy by the advent of two stepmothers in succession
alongside of his own mother. The young man did not blame his father, for
his father disapproved of polygamy, and was a polygamist only because he
could not help himself. It had come about in an evil hour when he was
desperate for a dowry for his eldest daughter, now come of marriageable
age. He had listened to the village money-lender's advice that he might
take a second wife himself and transfer to the daughter the dowry that
the second wife would bring. Then in like manner the lapse of time had
brought a second daughter to the marriage age, the necessity for another
dowry, and a third mother into the student's home. The poor fellow
himself was married too, and one could not resist the conjecture that
_his_ marriage was another sacrifice for the family, and that his
marriage had saved his father from bringing home yet another stepmother.
The redeeming feature of the story--the strength of Indian family
ties--let us not be blind to.

Polygamy in India is certainly now hiding itself. A couple of
generations ago it was practised wholesale by the kulin brahmans of
Bengal. Several middle-aged kulins are known to have had more