their sons, are verily called their protectors; but it is such protection! day and night must women be held by their protectors in a state of absolute dependence. A woman, it is affirmed, is never fit for independence, or to be trusted with liberty; for she may be compared to a heifer on the plain, which still longeth for fresh grass. They exhaust the catalogue of vice to affix its epithets to woman's name :-infidelity, violence, deceit, envy, extreme avariciousness, an entire want of good qualities, with impurity, they affirm, are the innate faults of womankind. And their deity has allotted to women a love of their bed, of their seat, and of ornaments, impure appetites, wrath, flexibility, desire of mischief, and bad conduct. Though her husband be devoid of all good qualities, yet, such is the estimate they form of her moral discrimination and sensibilities, that they bind the wife to revere him as a god, and to submit to his corporeal chastisements, whenever he chooses to inflict them, by a cane or a rope, on the back parts. observation was justly deduced from the facts of woman's history in India, when the historian said, a state of dependence more strict, contemptuous, and humiliating, than that which is ordained for the weaker sex among the Hindoos, cannot easily be conceived: and to consummate the stigma, to fill up the cup of bitter waters assigned to woman, as if she deserved to be excluded from immortality as well as from justice, from hope as well as from enjoyment, it is ruled that a female

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has no business with the texts of the Veda-that having no knowledge of expiatory texts, and no evidence of law, sinful woman must be foul as falsehood itself, and incompetent to bear witness. To them the fountain of wisdom is sealed, the streams of knowledge are dried up; the springs of individual consolation, as promised in their religion, are guarded and barred against woman in the hour of desolate sorrow and parching anguish; and cast out, as she is, upon the wilderness of bereavement and affliction, with her impoverished resources, her water may well be spent in the bottle; and, left as she is, will it be matter of wonder that, in the moment of despair, she should embrace the burning pile and its scorching flames, instead of lengthened solitude and degradation, of dark and humiliating suffering and sorrow?

Such, then, is the moral aspect of the female character and condition presented and entertained among the inhabitants of Hindostan; and it is not surprising that a visiter among them, after but a brief sojourn, should have seen the not uncommon exhibition of mothers, haggard with age and woe, whose children have so abused them, that their ears were torn open by violence and blows-depravity and moral turpitude are the legitimate offspring of such a parentage. The Hindoo, since he does not marry to secure a companion who will aid him in enduring the ills of life, or in obtaining the means of rational enjoyment, seeks only a slave who shall nourish (he thinks not of training) children, and

abide in abject subjection to his rule. I have seen when the sun had just risen, or was near his going down, the mother or the daughters coming forth from their homes, laden with their urn-like pitchers, for water from the well or the river, and I thought it appeared a vestige of patriarchal simplicity, a rude emblem of the days of their early sires; I did not then view it as a mark of their bondage or dejection. But when I have beheld the wife of the most wealthy, or other members of the Hindoo family, employed in the lowest drudgery, performing the most menial services, and found it was no uncommon spectacle, though humiliating indeed, to witness young women carrying out manure to the fields in baskets on their heads-with sorrow the inquiry has been put, what can be the resources of such beings in the hour of sadness and desolation, and on what can their thoughts dwell in the seasons of reflection; if, indeed, their immortal spirit ever takes a retrospect of the past, or casts a contemplative glance on the future? When their hands are idle, and they wander in solitary musing; when the heavens over them are blackening mystery, and the earth beneath them flits as the fabric of a visionary dream, on what can their souls lean, or their minds feed? When their children are the subjects of an expanding intelligence, and an inquisitive solicitude; when their subtle spirits, panting after a congenial element, inquire the things of an invisible world, or desire to understand the natural phenomena which every day arise, and which almost

spontaneously excite the attention of youthful curiosity, what light can the poor dark parent shed upon the mind--what aid can she render to the object naturally of her endeared affection? If uninstructed ignorance knew how to mourn its own barrenness, and bewail its own inefficiency, many and bitter indeed would be the unavailing regrets of the Hindoo female. But it is otherwise. The happiness after which this immortal and heavenderived intelligence aspires, is the absence of thought; to sleep as long as is possible, and to enjoy the most absolute indolence, is notoriously the acme of Hindoo female felicity.

What influence can such mothers exert in society? and yet relative and reciprocal influence they have -deleterious and baleful indeed! What preparation can they insure for the vicissitudes of life, the mutual duties of domestic intercourse, and the personal futurities of each individual? Can a fountain of bitter water send forth fresh and sweetening streams? Is it surprising that the standing character of the Hindoo population, and its reactive influence, should be shaded by the darkest colours, and productive of such poisonous fruit? The prayer of every devout heart will be, on receiving a recital so gloomy and affecting, "Send out thy light and thy truth, and fill the earth with the knowledge of thy name :

Let the Indian, let the negro,
Let the rude barbarian see,
That divine and glorious conquest
Once obtained on Calvary."

It is because females are ignorant of their obligations, their privileges, and what ought to be their motives, that delusion so easily overcomes them, and they so cheerfully, or inconsiderately, surrender themselves to the flames. But when they are introduced to the full possession of religious, scriptural, and otherwise useful knowledge, they will then be enabled to discharge the feminine duties, and sustain the natural and restored rights of the daughters of Eve; as also to instil the elements of truth, and impart a love and a zeal for knowledge to the generation of children intrusted to their care.

While political expediency has sanctioned the horrid rite, the persuasion of friends, the flatteries of parents, the delusions in which the female is trained, the miseries which they must anticipate, and the momentary paroxysm of bereavement, have not unfrequently driven the widow to the mad alternative, and warranted the poet's assertion :

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The widowed Indian, when her lord expires,
Mounts the dread pile, and braves the funeral fires."

This is a species of heroism which has been displayed by many of the timid Hindoos in upper and in humbler life; as well the princess as the wife of the husbandman, might and did suffer this immolation. Nor are the friends or kindred permitted to appear otherwise than as participators of the sacrifice and the virtues of the offering; the eldest son kindles the wood, and the mother and the daughters attend the fatal scene.