Page:The Land of the Veda.djvu/479

Rh and implicit obedience of woman to every whim and wish which her husband exacts from her, is extorted under the express teachings of her cruel faith, and she is well aware that he can quote the only “scriptures” she knows to justify every demand and wrong to which she tamely submits. Her poor judgment and conscience are held fast in the terrors of a system that contains not one ray of hope of any change for the better for her; while this has been the condition of the hundreds of millions of women in India since long before the incarnation of Christ. All that period of time she has been sunk and suffering in this manner.

If ever woman had an opportunity of showing what she might become under the teaching and influence of a civilization where Christianity or the Bible did not interfere with her state, the women of India have had that opportunity; and now, after forty centuries of such experiment, what is woman there to-day? These pages shall faithfully declare it to the women whom Christianity has redeemed, and then let them judge for themselves the difference and its cause.

In rendering this service to the truth I shall be under no liability to exaggerate, nor shall I make a single unsupported statement as to her condition. The evidence shall be all her own, and chapter and verse—Code, Purana, and Shaster—shall give their testimony to the exact truthfulness of my descriptions. I feel assured that those who read these pages will lay them down with the conviction that a more atrocious system for the extinction of the happiness and hopes of woman than that which is contained in the legislation of the Hindoos never was devised by priest or lawgiver since the hour when guilty man first began to throw the blame, the burden, and the wrongs of life, upon the weaker sex.

The most ancient body of human law now extant is the Institutes of Menu. This unique and whimsical system of legislation—the offspring of despotism and priestcraft—fixed the social and religious position of woman in India nearly a thousand years before Christ. The full title of the Code—which has been translated from the ancient Sanscrit by Sir W. Jones—is, “Institutes of Hindoo