t was told that the real cause
of widow-burning was a desire on the part of the men to put an end to
the frequent murders of husbands by their cruelly treated wives
(Reich, _212_). However that may be, the suttee in all probability was
due to the shrewd calculation that the fear of being burned alive, or
being more despised and abused than the lowest outcasts, would make
women more eager to follow obediently the code which makes of them
abject slaves of their husbands, living only for them and never having
a thought or a care for themselves.

HINDOO DEPRAVITY

Since, as Ward attests (116), the young widows "without exception,
become abandoned women," it is obvious that one reason why the priests
were so anxious to prevent them from marrying again was to insure an
abundant supply of victims for their immoral purposes. The
hypocritical Brahmans were not only themselves notorious libertines,
but they shrewdly calculated that the simplest way to win the favor
and secure control of the Indian populace was by pandering to their
sensual appetites and supplying abundant opportunities and excuses for
their gratification--making these opportunities, in fact, part and
parcel of their religious ceremonies. Their temples and their sacred
carts which traversed the streets were decorated with obscene pictures
of a peculiarly disgusting kind,[271] which were freely exposed to the
gaze of old and young of both sexes; their temples were little more
than nurseries for the rearing of bayaderes, a special class of
"sacred prostitutes;" while scenes of promiscuous debauchery sometimes
formed part of the religious ceremony, usually under some hypocritical
pretext.

It would be unjust, however, to make the Brahman priests entirely
responsible for Hindoo depravity. It has indeed been maintained that
there was a time when the Hindoos were free from all the vices which
now afflict them; but that is one of the silly myths of ignorant
dreamers, on a level with the notion that savages were corrupted by
whites. One of the oldest Hindoo documents, the _Mahabharata_, gives
us the native traditions concerning these "good old times" in two
sentences:

"Though in their youthful innocence the women abandoned
their husbands, they were guilty of no offence; for
such was the rule in early times." "Just as cattle are
situated, so are human beings, too, within their
respective castes"

which suggests a state of promiscuity as