fication of the law of
social progress that woman's rights will not be recognised until man's
have been. The brotherhood of man must be established before men
recognise that sister women too have rights. Translating into Indian
terms, and without professing to have given positive proof--caste
feeling must still further decay before the position of women becomes
much improved. At all events, judging by the past, it almost seems to
have been necessary for the Legislature to intervene to secure any
progress for the sex and 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