142 
HINDOOS. 
body of the youth with whom she was that day to have been married. 
You will be prepared now. Ladies, to expect that such a system of 
mental darkness will have rendered the sex, in India, the devoted 
victims of idolatry ; and such victims no other country, however 
savage, however benighted, can boast.— What must be the state of 
the female mind when mothers are found throwing the children of 
their vows into the sea! when a guard of Hindoo soldiers are neces- 
sary, to prevent mothers throwing their living children into the jaws 
of the alligators ! these mothers standing and watching the animal 
while it crushes the bones, tears the flesh, and drinks the blood, of 
their own ofispring 1 how deplorable the condition of your sex, when 
superstition thus extinguishes every sensibility of the female, and 
every feeling of the mother, and makes her more savage than the tiger 
which howls in the forest, but which always spares and cherishes its 
own offspring. 
** At the calls of superstition, < many females immolate themselves 
by a voluntary death in the sacred rivers of India. A friend of mine, 
at the junction of the Jumna and the Ganges at Allahabad, in one 
morning saw from his own window sixteen females, with pans of water 
fastened to their sides, sink themselves in the river; a few bubbles of 
air rising only to the surface of the water, after they w'ere gone down. 
The drowning of so many kittens in England would excite more horror 
here, than the drowning, on system, of your own sex in India. 
“But horrors still deeper are connected with the state of female 
society in India. The English magistrates in the presidency of Ben- 
gal, in their annual official returns to the Calcutta government, stale 
that in the year 1817, seven hundred and six widows were either burnt 
alive, or buried alive, with the dead bodies of their husbands, in that 
part of Britisli India. Is there any thing like this in the w'hole records 
of time ! have fires like these, and so numerous, ever been kindled 
any where else on earth — or graves like these ever been opened ?- - 
Two females roasted alive every day in one part of British India 
alone ! At noon-day, and in the presence of numerous spectators, the 
poor widow, ensnared and drawn to the funeral pile, is tied to the 
dead body, pressed down on the faggots by strong levers, and burnt 
alive, her screams amidst the flames being drowned by shouts and 
music. Amidst the spectators is her o^n son, her first-born, who, 
(tremendous idea) has set fire to the pile, and watches the progress 
of the flames which are to consume the living mother to ashes ; the 
mother who fed him from her breast, and dandled him on her knees, 
and who once looked up to him as the support of the declining days 
of herself and his father ! 
“ I have seenThree widows thus burnt alive, and could have wit- 
nessed' many more such spectacles, had they not been too much for 
my feelings. Other w'idow's are buried alive : here the female takes 
the dead body upon her knees, as she sits in the centre of a deep 
grave, and her children and relations, who have prepared the grave, 
throw in the earth around her ; two of these descend into the grave, 
and trample the earth with their feet around the body of the wido\y. 
She sits an iin remonstrating spectator of the process ': the earth rises 
higher and higher around her ; at length it reaches the head, >yhen 
