[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 women" may be gathered from many maxims in his volume like the following (the references being to the pages of Burnell and Hopkins's version):
"This is the nature of women, to seduce men here" (40);
"One should not be seated in a secluded place with a mother, sister, or daughter; the powerful host of the senses compels even a wise man" (41).