little
cot, she will wake up to-morrow safe. Now think for a moment steadily of
those who are somebody's little girls, just as dear to them and sweet,
needing as much the tenderest care as this your own little girl.

Think of them. Try to think of them as if they were your very own. They
are just like your own, in so many ways--only their future is different.

Oh, dear mothers, do you care? Do you care very much, I ask?

. . . . . . .

We passed the temple on our way home from the Village of the Lake. The
great gate was open, and the Brahmans and their friends were lounging in
and out, or sitting in the porch talking and laughing together. They
were talking about us as we passed. They were quite aware of our object
in coming, and were pleased that we had failed.

Government officials, English-speaking graduates, educated Hindus like
our old friend the schoolmaster, all would admit in private that to take
a child to the temple and "marry her" there was wrong. But very few have
much desire to right the shameful wrong.

There are thousands of recognised Slaves of the gods in this Presidency.
Under other names they exist all over India. There are thousands of
little child-wives; fewer here than elsewhere, we know, but many
everywhere. I do not for a moment suggest that all child-wives are
cruelly handled, any more than I would have it thought that all little
girls are available for the service of the gods. Nor would I have it
supposed that we see down this hell-crack every day. We may live for
years in the country and know very little about it. The medical
workers--God help them!--are those who are most frequently forced to
look down, and I, not being a medical, know infinitely less of its
depths than they. But this I do know, and do mean, and I mean it with an
intensity I know not how to express, _that this custom of infant
marriage and child marriage, whether to gods or men, is an infamous
custom; that it holds possibilities of wrong, such unutterable wrong,
that descriptive words concerning it can only "skirt the abyss," and
that in the name of all that is just and all that is merciful it should
be swept out of the land without a day's delay_.

We look to our Indian brothers. India is so immense that a voice crying
in the North is hardly heard in the South. Thank God for the one or two
voices crying in the wilderness. But many voices are needed, not only
one or two. Let the many v