en, 'My husband will discard me if I
do not bear a child.'"

[262] _Journal of Nat. Indian Assoc._, 1881, 543-49.

[263] The roots of this superstition, which has created such
unspeakable misery in India, go back to the oldest times of which
there are records. The Vedas say, "Endless are the worlds for those
men who have sons; but there is no place for those who have no male
offspring."

[264] Dr. S. Armstrong-Hopkins writes in her recent volume _Within the
Purdah_ (51-52): "A few years ago the English Government passed a law
to the effect that no bride should go to the house of her
mother-in-law before she arrived at the age of twelve years. I am
witness, however, as is every practising physician in India, that this
law is utterly ignored.... Often and often have I treated little women
patients of five, six, seven, eight, nine years, who were at that time
living with their husbands."

[265] If Darwin had dwelt on such facts in his _Descent of Man_, and
contrasted man's vileness with the devotion, sympathy, and
self-sacrifice shown by birds and other animals, he would have aroused
less indignation among his ignorant contemporaries. In these respects
it was the animals who had cause to resent his theory.

[266] Dr. Ryder says in her pathetic book, _Little Wives of India_: "A
man may be a vile and loathsome creature; he may be blind, a lunatic,
an idiot, a leper, or diseased in any form; he may be fifty, sixty, or
seventy years old, and may be married to a child of five or ten, who
positively loathes his presence; but if he claims her she must go.
There is no other form of slavery equal to it on the face of the
earth."

[267] The London _Times_ of November 11, 1889, had the following in
its column about India:

"Two shocking cases of wife killing lately came before
the courts, in both cases the result of child marriage.
In one a child aged ten was strangled by her husband.
In the second case a child of tender years was ripped
open with a wooden peg. Brutal sexual exasperation was
the sole apparent reason in both instances. Compared
with the terrible evils of child marriage, widow
cremation is of infinitely inferior magnitude."

[268] Manu's remark that "where women are honored there the gods are
pleased" is one of those expressions of unconscious humor which
naturally escaped him, but should not have escaped European
sociologists. What he understands by "honoring wo