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 marriage ceremonies; since temples, tanks, and groves secured esteem in this life, and promised some advantage in the next, and an outlay in such works might therefore have been preferred.  But under such governments a man’s title even to the exclusive possession of his wife might not be considered as altogether secure under the mere sanction of religion; and the outlay in feeding the family, tribe, and neighbourhood during the marriage ceremony seems to have been considered as a kind of value in exchange given for her to society.  There is nothing that she and her husband recollect