rnment in bringing these
religious murders to an end.

Suttee was also regarded as a high type of religious devotion. For the
widow to immolate herself upon the funeral pyre of her dead husband was
not only the supreme test of wifely devotion, it was also preeminently the
highest religious act possible to her; and it brought to her a future
bliss which was painted in glowing and attractive colours by the sacred
books of her faith. It was not strange, therefore, that the State
hesitated, for a long time, to abolish by law this hideous custom, whereby
in the year 1817, for instance, two widows were burned daily in the Bengal
Presidency alone.

It was in the face of extensive protest and threats by orthodox Hindus
that the government abolished it. "Previous to 1857, 150 human sacrifices
are said to have been annually offered in Gumsur, a city in East Central
India; and the abolition of that horrible custom raised such a storm of
opposition among the Hindus that an eight years' war was the result. More
than 2,000 victims were rescued from sacrifice and handed over to the care
of the missionaries." In like manner infanticide was encouraged for
centuries in the land as an act of religious devotion which was possessed
of great efficacy. In the name of religion and with the promise of its
highest blessings mothers were led to feed the crocodiles of the sacred
Ganges by throwing to them their own infants.

It seems hardly possible that human beings could regard the prohibition of
that inhuman and unnatural act as a piece of injustice and an interference
with the rights of conscience. And yet it was so regarded!

Not fewer than twenty laws have thus been enacted in that land, during the
last century, with a view to putting an end to religious customs which
robbed thousands of people, annually, of life itself and deprived many
thousands more of the most elementary and inalienable rights of human
beings. So it has become penal to do any one of the following things, all
of which were regarded as expressions of the highest religious devotion
and were committed with the sanction of the ancestral faith and under the
inspiration of its benediction: to burn widows; to expose parents to death
on the banks of the Ganges; to offer up human sacrifice; to murder
children, either by throwing them into the Ganges, or by the Rajpoot
secret method of infanticide; to encourage men to throw away their lives
under temple cars and in other ways of