to all the old Hindu
family privileges. The Hindu joint family system, while it has been a
source of some blessing to the land, has also been a serious curse in that
it has fostered laziness, dissension and improvidence, and has put a ban
upon individual initiative and ambition.

Child marriages have been an unfailing source of evil to the land. Of this
Sir John Strachey says: "It would be difficult to imagine anything more
abominable than the frequent consequences of child marriages by which
multitudes of girls of ten to twelve or less are given over to outrage;
or, if they belong to the higher class of Hindus, are doomed to lives of
degraded widowhood."

The Indian government has endeavoured to remove this evil; but at all
points it has been opposed not only by conservative, orthodox Hindus, but
also by educated members of the community. No system can degrade the
womanhood of a race, nor, indeed, for that matter, its manhood, more than
that which marries its girls in childhood and which consigns millions of
them to wretched widowhood. One of the consequences is that girls of even
twelve years are known to become mothers in that land, while very few
attain the age of eighteen without bearing children. An increasing
population under these physical conditions cannot be a healthy or a
vigorous one.

(_b_) Society.

In India, Society is almost exclusively the product of the ancient caste
system. A more elaborate social system than this was never known in the
world. It is an order of social tyranny of the worst sort, whereby every
man is compelled to give up his own individuality and to be bound to the
iron will of an ignorant community: a will also which is based upon the
past and conforms to the rules and habits of peoples who lived in remote
antiquity. No greater millstone could be hung around the neck of any
people than that of the multitudinous caste rules of Manu and later
accretions which are the all in all of Hindu life. There may have been
good in this system in the past, and it may have conserved some blessings
of antiquity; but today it is the worst tyranny and the greatest curse
that has blasted the life of the people. It is the source of their
physical degeneracy, for it compels them to marry within narrow lines of
consanguinity. It has cursed the people with a narrow sympathy; for no man
in that system deems it his duty to bless or help those beyond his own
caste. It has sown poverty broadcast over t