Other similar cases have occurred in recent years.  One occurred close to Calcutta in 1892.  In the hill tracts of Orissa bordering on the Central Provinces the rite of human sacrifice was practised by the Khonds on an awful scale, and with horrid cruelty, It was suppressed by the special efforts of Macpherson, Campbell, MacViccar, and other officers, between the years 1837 and 1854.  Daring that period the British officers rescued 1,506 victims intended for sacrifice (Narrative of Major-General John Campbell, C.B., of his Operations in the Hill Tracts of Orissa for the Suppression of Human Sacrifices and Female Infanticide.  Printed for private circulation.  London:  Hurst and Blackett, 1861).  The rite, when practised by Hindoos, may have been borrowed from some of the aboriginal races.  The practice, however, has been so general throughout the world that few peoples can claim the honour of freedom from the stain of adopting it at one time or another, Much curious information on the subject, and many modern instances of human sacrifices in India, are collected in the article ‘Sacrifice’ in Balfour, Cyclopaedia of India, 3rd edition, 1885.  Major S. C. Macpherson, Memorials of Service in India (1865), and Frazer, Golden Bough, 3rd edition, Part V, vol. i (1912), pp. 236 seq., may also be consulted.

9.  Bernier vividly describes an ‘infernal tragedy’ of this kind which he witnessed, in or about the year 1659, during Aurangzeb’s reign, in Rajputana.  On that occasion five female slaves burnt themselves with their mistress (Travels, ed.  Constable and V. A. Smith (1914), p. 309).

10.  Hinduism is a social system, not a creed, A Hindoo may believe, or disbelieve, what speculative doctrine he chooses, but he must not eat, drink, or marry, save in accordance with the custom of his caste.  Compare Asoka on toleration; ’The sects of other people all deserve reverence for one reason or another’ (Rock Edict xii; V. A. Smith, Asoka, 2nd edition (1909), p. 170).

11.  Mir Salamat Ali is a stanch Sunni, the sect of Osman; and they are always at daggers drawn with the Shias, or the sect of Ali.  He alludes to the Shias when he says that one of the seventy-two sects is always ready to take in the whole of the other seventy-one.  Muhammad, according to the traditions, was one day heard to say, ’The time will come when my followers will he divided into seventy-three sects; all of them will assuredly go to hell save one.’  Every one of the seventy-three sects believes itself to be the one happily excepted by their prophet, and predestined to paradise.  I am sometimes disposed to think Muhammad was self-deluded, however difficult it might be to account for so much ‘method in his madness’.  It is difficult to conceive a man placed in such circumstances with more amiable dispositions or with juster views of the rights and duties of men in all their relations with each other, than are exhibited by him on almost all occasions, save where the question of faith in his divine mission was concerned.