Page:Allan Octavian Hume, C.B.; Father of the Indian National Congress.djvu/164

 amongst us know that it is the result of that deep-seated affection that springs from early association and reUgious (if you will, superstitious) teachings.

"Where will you find a wife so true and contented as a Hindu's ? Where more purity of thought or more religious fervour than in the Hindu women of respectable families ? Our men, alas ! may be materiahsts, atheists, immoral, base, but our women are goodness in human shape — and why ? because they have been shown an object on which to concentrate the entire love and veneration of their natures at a time when their pure hearts were un- sullied by any other impressions or ideas, and taught to look up to their husbands, whose faces they could only look oi( after many solemn ceremonies, as their guardians, protectors,' and gods."

Everything in this world has its darker and brighter sides and the blackest cloud has some silver lining ; and though my friend in his happy husbandhood (for his has been, I know, a happy infant marriage) generalizes too enthusiasti- cally from his own experience, still he has some foundation for his contention ; and infant marriage (though fraught with grievous misery in too many cases, though a custom marked for extinction and daily becoming more and of an ana- chronism and more and more of an evil, taking its results as a whole), has not yet become that unmitigated curse, unrelieved by redeeming features, which, forgive me if I say so, your vigorous onslaught would, it seems to me, lead the European reader to believe.

Do you remember " Uncle Tom's Cabin " ? There was not one incident recorded in that novel, in connection with the grievous iniquities of slavery, for which actual warrant did not exist, and yet the general result was to produce a grossly exaggerated picture of the working of the system. Many look upon that highly coloured narrative as the first seed of the subsequent emancipation of the slaves ; person- ally, I credit it mainly with the perfectly needless slaughter of about half a million of persons. It took hold on the mind of the nation. It grievously angered the Southerners, many