y felt that
his time had come to prevent the murder of the innocents all over India
in the three forms of female infanticide, voluntary drowning, and
widow-burning or burying alive. His old friend, Udny, having become a
member of Council or colleague of the Governor-General, he prepared
three memorials to Government on each of these crimes. When afterwards
he had enlisted Claudius Buchanan in the good work, and had employed
trustworthy natives to collect statistics proving that in the small
district around Calcutta 275 widow murders thus took place in six
months of 1803, and when he was asked by Dr. Ryland to state the facts
which, with his usual absence of self-regarding, he had not reported
publicly, or even in letters home, he thus replied:--

"27th April 1808.--The report of the burning of women, and some others,
however, were made by me. I, at his expense, however, made the
inquiries and furnished the reports, and believe they are rather below
the truth than above it. I have, since I have been here, through a
different medium, presented three petitions or representations to
Government for the purpose of having the burning of women and other
modes of murder abolished, and have succeeded in the case of
infanticide and voluntary drowning in the river. Laws were made to
prevent these, which have been successful."

But there was a crime nearer home, committed in the river flowing past
his own door, and especially at Sagar Island, where the Ganges loses
itself in the ocean. At that tiger-haunted spot, shivering in the cold
of the winter solstice, every year multitudes of Hindoos, chiefly wives
with children and widows with heavy hearts, assembled to wash away
their sins--to sacrifice the fruit of their body for the sin of their
soul. Since 1794, when Thomas and he had found in a basket hanging on
a tree the bones of an infant exposed, to be devoured by the white
ants, by some mother too poor to go on pilgrimage to a sacred
river-spot, Carey had known this unnatural horror. He and his brethren
had planned a preaching tour to Sagar, where not only mothers drowned
their first born in payment of a vow, with the encouragement of the
Brahmans, but widows and even men walked into the deep sea and drowned
themselves at the spot where Ganga and Sagar kiss each other, "as the
highest degree of holiness, and as securing immediate heaven." The
result of Carey's memorial was the publication of the Regulation for
preventing