Page:Allan Octavian Hume, C.B.; Father of the Indian National Congress.djvu/167

 Such I would only pray by sympathy and watchful care, by tenderness and love, to mitigate so far as may be the lonely lot of the poor women that they are compelled by religious convictions thus to isolate, and by educating all their women, and elevating their mental and moral status, to minimize the inevitable evils, resulting from this enforced, and in the cases of young women, unnatural widowhood. As for those fellows, whose whole lives, redolent of fraud, falsehood, greed or gluttony, show plainly how little they regard the Shastras, and who yet seize upon texts, out of sacred writings (every other command of which they dis- regard when it suits their own purposes) to justify the retention, as ill-used household drudges or unacknowledged concubines, of the poor women entrusted to their care, they are hypocrites whom I hope all brother Hindus, orthodox and unorthodox, will combine to reward as they merit.

No ! let the real believer, who lives honestly and truly by his Shastras, still keep his widowed daughter or daughter-in- law, unmarried according to his creed — in such a house, no harm will come to her. It may seem hard upon the poor girl — but in a truly pious household trials are but the seeds of future glories. But let the hypocrite who, whenever he seeks the gratification of his own vices or passions, disregards the sacred commands he pretends to accept, though making a great show of reverencing them when it suits his purpose, remember, that call it by what name men will, there is a retribution for all wrong and that he shall surely himself suffer for all the suffering he causes, and for all the sin and sorrow this may evolve.

In the second place, besides holding that obnoxious as are the customs against which you take arms, you have somewhat exaggerated the magnitude and universality of the evils to which they give rise, I cannot but fear that your method of thus attacking particular branches of a larger question, as if they could be successfully isolated and dealt with as distinct entities, is calculated to mislead the public, to confuse their conceptions of proportion, to entail loss of power and intensify, what seems to me at this present