“Among Mundas having any pretensions to respectability the young people are not allowed to arrange these affairs [matrimonial] for themselves.  Their parents settle it all for them, French fashion, and after the liberty they have enjoyed, and the liaisons they are sure to have made, this interference on the part of the old folk must be very aggravating to the young ones.”

If the dissolute or imbecile advocates of “free love” had their way, we should sink to the level of these wild tribes of India; but there is no danger of our losing again the large “tracts of mind, and thought, and feeling” we have acquired since our ancestors, who came from India, were in such a degraded state as these neighbors of theirs.

[261] Statistics have shown that twenty-eight per cent of the females were married before their fourth year.  The ancient Sutras ordained the age of six to seven the best for girls to marry, and declared that a father who waits till his daughter is twelve years old must go to hell.  The evils are aggravated by the fact noted by Dr. Ryder (who gives many pathetic details) that a Hindoo girl of ten often appears like an European child of six, owing to the weak physique inherited from these girl mothers.  Yet Mrs. Mansell relates: 

“Many pitiable child-wives have said to me, ’Oh, Doctor mem Sahib, I implore you, do give me medicine that I may become a mother.’  I have looked at their innocent faces and tender bodies, and asked, ‘Why?’ The reply has invariably been, ’My husband will discard me if I do not bear a child.’”

[262] Journal of Nat.  Indian Assoc., 1881, 543-49.

[263] The roots of this superstition, which has created such unspeakable misery in India, go back to the oldest times of which there are records.  The Vedas say, “Endless are the worlds for those men who have sons; but there is no place for those who have no male offspring.”

[264] Dr. S. Armstrong-Hopkins writes in her recent volume Within the Purdah (51-52):  “A few years ago the English Government passed a law to the effect that no bride should go to the house of her mother-in-law before she arrived at the age of twelve years.  I am witness, however, as is every practising physician in India, that this law is utterly ignored....  Often and often have I treated little women patients of five, six, seven, eight, nine years, who were at that time living with their husbands.”

[265] If Darwin had dwelt on such facts in his Descent of Man, and contrasted man’s vileness with the devotion, sympathy, and self-sacrifice shown by birds and other animals, he would have aroused less indignation among his ignorant contemporaries.  In these respects it was the animals who had cause to resent his theory.

[266] Dr. Ryder says in her pathetic book, Little Wives of India:  “A man may be a vile and loathsome creature; he may be blind, a lunatic, an idiot, a leper, or diseased in any form; he may be fifty, sixty, or seventy years old, and may be married to a child of five or ten, who positively loathes his presence; but if he claims her she must go.  There is no other form of slavery equal to it on the face of the earth.”