obey and submit to the indignities of the
worst kind from her husband? And is it remarkable that the Hindu widow,
rather than endure the neglect, the temptations and the obloquy of her
widowhood, should have preferred to practice Suttee and to end her
miseries upon the funeral pyre of her husband? When we remember that their
system consigns one-fifth of all the women of India--more than 20,000,000
souls--to this despised and ostracized widow class, we realize the depth of
evil which flows from the system.

There is still another cruel injustice inflicted upon the womanhood of
India. Many thousands (there are 12,000 in South India alone) of her
daughters are dedicated in infancy to a life of shame in connection with
temple worship in that land. These women, the so-called "servants of the
gods," have been mostly dedicated by fond mothers to this wretched life as
a thank offering to the gods for blessings received. This seems very
strange when it is known that all such girls thereby become public
characters. The "Dancing Girl" of India is thus shut up to her evil life
by those who love her most; and her religious profession becomes to her
the highway to perdition and a bitter curse to society. Recent effort has
been made, in Bombay, to save such girls by making it a legal offence to
"marry" them to the gods and thus devoting them to a life of shame. But
this law only refers to the dedication of girls of tender age in Bombay.
It is exceedingly sad that, practically, the whole population is utterly
indifferent to this greatest insult committed against the womanhood of
India and to the coupling of their own religion and their gods with the
ruin of the soul and body of many thousands of the daughters of the land.

It is not remarkable, under these circumstances, that among all the people
of India the birth of a daughter is the most unwelcome of domestic events.
The evils which surely await her, and the greater possibilities of sorrow
and suffering which surround her, the great burden of expense and of
trouble which her training, and especially her marriage, will entail upon
the family--all combine to make her birth a much dreaded event.

The large expense, in the shape of the marriage dowry and the wedding
expenses which have to be incurred among nearly all classes in connection
with the disposal of their daughters, only make this situation the more
emphatic.

The practice of infanticide, so extensively found in India, was