sad condition_.

Marriage, with all its ceremonies, its rights, and its duties, fills
their imagination from infancy to age; and I do not believe there is
a country upon earth in which a larger portion of the wealth of the
community is spent in the ceremonies, or where the rights are better
secured, or the duties better enforced, notwithstanding all the
disadvantages of the laws of polygamy. Not one man in ten can afford
to maintain more than one wife, and not one in ten of those who can
afford it will venture upon 'a sea of troubles' in taking a second,
if he has a child by the first. One of the evils which press most
upon Indian society is the necessity which long usage has established
of squandering large sums in marriage ceremonies. Instead of giving
what they can to their children to establish them, and enable them to
provide for their families and rise in the world, parents everywhere
feel bound to squander all they can borrow in the festivities of
their marriage. Men in India could never feel secure of being
permitted freely to enjoy their property under despotic and unsettled
governments, the only kind of governments they knew or hoped for; and
much of the means that would otherwise have been laid out in forming
substantial works, with a view to a return in income of some sort or
another, for the remainder of their own lives and of those of their
children, were expended in tombs, temples, sarais, tanks, groves, and
other works--useful and ornamental, no doubt, but from which neither
they nor their children could ever hope to derive income of any kind.
The same feeling of insecurity gave birth, no doubt, to this
preposterous usage, which tends so much to keep down the great mass
of the people of India to that grade in which they were born, and in
which they have nothing but their manual labour to depend upon for
their subsistence. Every man feels himself bound to waste all his
stock and capital, and exhaust all his credit, in feeding idlers
during the ceremonies which attend the marriage of his children,
because his ancestors squandered similar sums, and he would sink in
the estimation of society if he were to allow his children to be
married with less.

But it could not have been solely because men could not invest their
means in profitable works, with any chance of being long permitted to
enjoy the profits under such despotic and unsettled governments, that
they squandered them in feeding idle people in marri