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dometic circle around the wife of twelve years is composed of relatives by law. Blood relatives have no right of admission there; they may be and are frequently excluded.

"The branded and bound Brahmin girl had no blood relatives near while she was being treated with more than brutal violence. But what is this treatment ? Is it not the treatment that too frequently belongs to the child wife ? The youthful creature goes to her future home, and nothing is more probable than that she could do things which would be accounted crimes by her mother-in-law, and which her own mother would not so much as notice. Nay the very constraint that placed upon a girl wife is sufficient to make her ommit offences, or supposed offences, which a regorus mother-in-law would report as enormous in heinusness, and being so reported, they bring down upon he tender helpless offender such punishment as only toward nature can conceive and a cruel brute inflict to tie the helpless victim with cords, to heat an iron in the fire, to glut deliberately over the torture which hesearing would inflict, and finally to enjoy the agonizing shrieks produced by the application of the burning instrument, and grin with pleasure as the features became convulsed and the living tender flesh quivered : to do all this to a woman, to a child in years can only be the work of a demon and a fiend. Compared with this cruelty, being trampled to death under the feet of an elephant is a mild judicial punishment which a Hindoo kingly tyrant might be expected to inflict on a State malefactor or a rebel traitor. But even kingly tyrants do not take such vengeance, the vengeance of searing the flesh with heated irons, upon young girls; certainly they would not do so far real on imaginary domestic offences such as a girl of tended years might be supposed to commit.

"That marriage begun in utter dependance and married life sustained under the frequent application of domestic torture - ropes and heated irons - should end in the self-immolation of the widow on the funeral pile of a dead husband is what one might be prepared to expect. The married life and married education a point to such a termination; the victim makes the voluntary sacrifice.

"The cruelty that may be practised on a child-widow could never be inflicted with impunity upon a wife who was married at the age of womanhood. The power and influence that are exercised by law relations upon young girl from the moment in which she enters the home of her husband are never lost; dependence and helplessness continue to be conditions of existence of the Brahmin wife from early youth to old age. It is this which gives to Hindoo widow marriage half importance, and for this

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