Page:The Land of the Veda.djvu/503

Rh enough; but the king, with unquestioned power of life or death in his hands, if once infuriated or enraged, can torture or kill without question. ‘My wife is about to be confined,’ said a savage Hindoo Rajah to his European friend, a solicitor, ‘and if she does not make me the father of a son, I will whip her to death with my hunting-whip.’ The child was born; it was a daughter; the woman's body was burned two days after. How she died no one out of the zenana certainly knew. The fact of the threat only transpired long afterward, when it was the interest of the solicitor, to whom the remark had been made, to prove the Rajah mad in his later days in order to set aside a will.”

The discrimination is against women as such. Menu and his commentators decree no equivalent punishment upon male violators of their law or customs, and he actually shields from all penalty the whole sacerdotal class who formed these laws, no matter how many or flagrant their crimes may be. No such “class legislation” was ever enacted as is exhibited in the following section of the Code: “Never shall the king slay a Brahmin, though convicted of all possible crimes; let him banish the offender from his realm, but with all his property secure and his body unhurt. No greater crime is known on earth than slaying a Brahmin, and the king, therefore, must not even form in his mind an idea of killing a priest.” Sec. 380.

When General Havelock, in 1857, laid his hands upon these dainty and pampered Brahmins, and, finding them guilty of mutiny or murder, tried and convicted them like common men, and ordered them for punishment or execution, some of the poor benighted people whom they had thus deluded thought that the earth would surely quake or the heavens fall. But, in defiance of this unjust Code, they were strung up, and the earth was still, the sun rolled on in its course indifferent to their fate, and the spell of Brahminical inviolability was broken forever, after the long imposition and cruel falsehood of its claim. But in the breaking of that spell women in India had more interest, and gained more advantage, than in any event of the past generation. She knows it not