give a foothold to the new ideas, glaringly unfair to the sex as the old ideas were.  Thus in 1870 female infanticide, earlier prohibited in single provinces, was put down by law throughout India; although there are localities still in which the small proportion of female children justifies the belief that female infanticide is not extinct.[23] Nevertheless, let the progress of the new ideas regarding women be noted; we compare the hesitating inference of the practice of female infanticide in the Indian Census Report of 1901 with the voluminous evidence in the two volumes of Parliamentary Papers on Infanticide in India published in 1824 and 1828.  Kathiawar and Cutch, Baroda and Rajputana, round Benares and parts of Oude and Madras were the localities particularly infected with the barbarous custom in the first quarter of the century.  But to return to the recognition of the rights of women in legislative enactments.  In 1829 an Act of the Supreme Government in Bengal made Suttee or the burning of a widow upon the dead husband’s pyre an offence for all concerned.  In 1830 similar Acts were passed by the Governments of Madras and Bombay, and the abolition of Suttee is now universally approved.[24] Such is the educative influence of a good law.  Perhaps a would-be patriot may yet occasionally be heard so belauding the devotion of the widows who burned themselves that his praise is tantamount to a lament over the abolition of Suttee.  But the general sentiment has been completely changed since the first quarter of the nineteenth century, when the Missionaries and some outstanding Indians like the Bengali reformer Rammohan Roy agitated for the abolition of Suttee, and the Government, convinced, still hesitated to put down a custom so generally approved.  In these changed times it will hardly be believed that Rammohan Roy only ventured to argue against any form of compulsion being put upon the widow, and that the orthodox champions of the practice appealed against the abolition not only to the Governor-General, but also to the King in Council,—­the petition having been heard in the House of Lords in 1832.  But once more to return to the emancipation of women by Acts of the Legislature.  By another Act, in 1856, the Indian Government abolished the legal restrictions to widow marriage.  Still another Act, in 1891, forbade cohabitation before the age of twelve; and although fiercely opposed in the native press and in mass meetings, the Act, which expressed the views of many educated Hindus, is now apparently acquiesced in by all, and must be educating the community into a new idea of marriage.

In five aspects the social inferiority of the female sex is still apparent—­namely, in the illiteracy of females, in marriage before womanhood, in polygamy, in the seclusion of women, and in the prohibition of the marriage of widows.  Excepting the last, no one of these customs is imposed by caste, nor is the last even in every caste.