of compulsion, drugging, widows
under sixteen, and proved pregnancy. The police--natives--were to be
present, and to report every case. At the very time the British
Parliament were again refusing in the charter discussions of 1813 for
another twenty years to tolerate Christianity in its Eastern
dependency, the Indian legislature legalised the burning and burying
alive of widows, who numbered at least 6000 in nine only of the next
sixteen years, from 1815 to 1823 inclusive.

From Plassey in 1757 to 1829, three quarters of a century, Christian
England was responsible, at first indirectly and then most directly,
for the known immolation of at least 70,000 Hindoo widows. Carey was
the first to move the authorities; Udny and Wellesley were the first to
begin action against an atrocity so long continued and so atrocious.
While the Governor-Generals and their colleagues passed away, Carey and
his associates did not cease to agitate in India and to stir up
Wilberforce and the evangelicals in England, till the victory was
gained. The very first number of the Friend of India published their
essay on the burning of widows, which was thereafter quoted on both
sides of the conflict, as "a powerful and convincing statement of the
real facts and circumstances of the case," in Parliament and elsewhere.
Nor can we omit to record the opinion of Carey's chief pundit, with
whom he spent hours every day as a fellow-worker. The whole body of
law-pundits wrote of Sati as only "permitted." Mritunjaya, described
as the head jurist of the College of Fort William and the Supreme
Court, decided that, according to Hindooism, a life of mortification is
the law for a widow. At best burning is only an alternative for
mortification, and no alternative can have the force of direct law.
But in former ages nothing was ever heard of the practice, it being
peculiar to a later and more corrupt era. "A woman's burning herself
from the desire of connubial bliss ought to be rejected with
abhorrence," wrote this colossus of pundits. Yet before he was
believed, or the higher law was enforced, as it has ever since been
even in our tributary States, mothers had burned with sons, and forty
wives, many of them sisters, at a time, with polygamous husbands.
Lepers and the widows of the devotee class had been legally buried
alive. Magistrates, who were men like Metcalfe, never ceased to prevent
widow-murder on any pretext, wherever they might be placed, in defi