Page:McCosh, John - Advice to Officers in India (1856).djvu/229

 out in vivid colours how often the religious opinions of the Hindoos operate destructively on the lives of the people who profess them; their pilgrimages, their penances, their mutilations, their self-inflicted tortures, and self-sacrifices, but that would swell this Essay to an inconvenient extent, and shall conclude this chapter with only one more example.

21. THUGGEEISM.—Amongst the many causes that in India shorten the span of life, and add to the rate of mortality is the system of Thuggee. This system, which has horrified the world by the heinousness of its guilt, and exhibited a picture of human depravity unparalleled in the history of any nation, has been practised in India for more than two hundred years,and though greatly checked, continues even till this day. The blackest page in the records of the rudest and most savage state of mankind vanishes, and becomes white as snow when contrasted with the enormity of villainy inseparable from the trade of Thuggee, and our astonishment is only increased when we find it practised by the courtly Mussulman and the timid Hindoo; and, that a nation that could, out of compassion or charity, establish hospitals for sick animals, and even crawling insects; and the greater portion of whom would shrink with horror from shedding the blood of any living creature, even for their own subsistence,