lity."

After we had taken Orissa from the Marathas the priests of Jaganath
declared that the night before the conquest the god had made known its
desire to be under British protection. This was joyfully reported to
Lord Wellesley's Government by the first British commissioner. At once
a regulation was drafted vesting the shrine and the increased
pilgrim-tax in the Christian officials. This Lord Wellesley
indignantly refused to sanction, and it was passed by Sir George Barlow
in spite of the protests of Carey's friend, Udny. In Conjeeveram a
Brahmanised civilian named Place had so early as 1796 induced
Government to undertake the payment of the priests and prostitutes of
the temples, under the phraseology of "churchwardens" and "the
management of the church funds." Even before the Madras iniquity, the
pilgrims to Gaya from 1790, if not before, paid for authority to offer
funeral cakes to the manes of their ancestors and to worship Vishnoo
under the official seal and signature of the English Collector.
Although Charles Grant's son, Lord Glenelg, when President of the Board
of Control in 1833, ordered, as Theodosius had done on the fall of
pagan idolatry in A.D. 390, that "in all matters relating to their
temples, their worship, their festivals, their religious practices,
their ceremonial observances, our native subjects be left entirely to
themselves," the identification of Government with Hindooism was not
completely severed till a recent period.

The Charak, or swinging festival, has been frequently witnessed by the
present writer in Calcutta itself. The orgie has been suppressed by
the police in great cities, although it has not ceased in the rural
districts. In 1814 the brotherhood thus wrote home:--

"This abominable festival was held, according to the annual custom, on
the last day of the Hindoo year. There were fewer gibbet posts erected
at Serampore, but we hear that amongst the swingers was one female. A
man fell from a stage thirty cubits high and broke his back; and
another fell from a swinging post, but was not much hurt. Some days
after the first swinging, certain natives revived the ceremonies. As
Mr. Ward was passing through Calcutta he saw several Hindoos hanging by
the heels over a slow fire, as an act of devotion. Several Hindoos
employed in the printing-office applied this year to Mr. Ward for
protection, to escape being dragged into these pretendedly voluntary
practices. This brought bef