creature!  I can’t bear the thought of anyone so vile.  I wish she had never been born.”  Her mother-in-law says:  “The horned viper!  She has bitten my son and killed him, and now he is dead, and she, useless creature, is left behind.”  It is impossible for her to escape this fate by marrying again.  The bare mention of remarriage by a widow, though she be only eight or nine years old, would be regarded, says Dubois (I., 191), “as the greatest of insults.”  Should she marry again “she would be hunted out of society, and no decent person would venture at any time to have the slightest intercourse with her.”

Attempts have been made in recent times by liberal-minded men to marry widows; but they were subjected to so much odium and persecution therefor that they were driven to suicide.

When a widow dies her corpse is disposed of with hardly any ceremony.  Should a widow try to escape her fate the only alternatives are suicide or a life of shame.  To a Hindoo widow, says Ramabai Sarasvati, death is “a thousand times more welcome than her miserable existence.”  It is for this reason that the suttee or “voluntary” burning of widows on the husband’s funeral pyre—­the climax of inhuman atrocity—­lost some of its horrors to the victims until the moment of agony arrived.  I have already (p. 317) refuted the absurd whim that this voluntary death of Hindoo widows was a proof of their conjugal devotion.  It was proof, on the contrary, of the unutterably cruel selfishness of the male Hindoos, who actually forged a text to make the suttee seem a religious duty—­a forgery which during two thousand years caused the death of countless innocent women.  Best was told that the real cause of widow-burning was a desire on the part of the men to put an end to the frequent murders of husbands by their cruelly treated wives (Reich, 212).  However that may be, the suttee in all probability was due to the shrewd calculation that the fear of being burned alive, or being more despised and abused than the lowest outcasts, would make women more eager to follow obediently the code which makes of them abject slaves of their husbands, living only for them and never having a thought or a care for themselves.

HINDOO DEPRAVITY

Since, as Ward attests (116), the young widows “without exception, become abandoned women,” it is obvious that one reason why the priests were so anxious to prevent them from marrying again was to insure an abundant supply of victims for their immoral purposes.  The hypocritical Brahmans were not only themselves notorious libertines, but they shrewdly calculated that the simplest way to win the favor and secure control of the Indian populace was by pandering to their sensual appetites and supplying abundant opportunities and excuses for their gratification—­making these opportunities, in fact, part and parcel of their religious ceremonies.  Their temples and their