sacred carts which traversed the streets were decorated with obscene pictures of a peculiarly disgusting kind,[271] which were freely exposed to the gaze of old and young of both sexes; their temples were little more than nurseries for the rearing of bayaderes, a special class of “sacred prostitutes;” while scenes of promiscuous debauchery sometimes formed part of the religious ceremony, usually under some hypocritical pretext.

It would be unjust, however, to make the Brahman priests entirely responsible for Hindoo depravity.  It has indeed been maintained that there was a time when the Hindoos were free from all the vices which now afflict them; but that is one of the silly myths of ignorant dreamers, on a level with the notion that savages were corrupted by whites.  One of the oldest Hindoo documents, the Mahabharata, gives us the native traditions concerning these “good old times” in two sentences: 

“Though in their youthful innocence the women abandoned their husbands, they were guilty of no offence; for such was the rule in early times.”  “Just as cattle are situated, so are human beings, too, within their respective castes”

which suggests a state of promiscuity as decided as that which prevailed in Australia.  Civilization did not teach the Hindoos love—­for that comes last—­but merely the refinements of lust, such as even the Greeks and Romans hardly knew.  Ovid’s Ars Amandi is a model of purity compared with the Hindoo “Art of Love,” the K[=a]mas[=u]tram (or Kama Soutra) of V[=a]tsy[=a]yana, which is nothing less than a handbook for libertines, of which it would be impossible even to print the table of contents.  Whereas the translator of Ovid into a modern language need not omit more than a page of the text, the German translator of the K[=a]mas[=u]tram, Dr. Richard Schmidt, who did his work in behalf of the Kgl.  Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, felt it incumbent on him to turn more than fifty pages out of four hundred and seventy into Latin.  Yet the author of this book, who lived about two thousand years ago, recommends that every one, including young girls, should study it.  In India, as his French translator, Lamairesse, writes, “everything is done to awaken carnal desires even in young children of both sexes.”  The natural result is that, as the same writer remarks (186): 

“Les categories des femmes faciles sont si nombreuses qu’elles doivent comprendre presque toutes les personnes du sexe.  Aussi un ministre protestant ecrivait-il au milieu de notre siecle qu’il n’existait presque point de femmes vertueuses dans l’Inde.”

The Rev. William Ward wrote (162) in 1824: