than even this—as where he found only three per cent. of girls, and in one no girls at all, the inhabitants freely “confessing that they had destroyed every girl born in their village.”
The guilty agents were generally the parents themselves, ofttimes the mothers, with their own hands. Sir John Malcolm positively states, in his Report on Central India, that “the mother is commonly the executioner of her own offspring.” Professing to open the fount of life to her babe, she coolly and deliberately impregnates it with the elements of death, by putting opium on the nipple of her breast, which the child inhaling with its milk, dies. But the juice of the poppy is not the only ingredient by whose “mortal taste” so many unoffending victims fill the unmarked graves of India. The madar, or the dutterrea plant, the tobacco leaf, starvation, drowning, exposure in the jungle, and even strangulation, are the modes employed by these wretches for their fell purposes. “Without natural affection,” truly!
Human language, with all its resources, furnishes a feeble and inadequate medium of expression for the horror which such deeds of hell awaken in the heart. Probably the celebrated Encyclopedist has as nearly expressed it as is possible when he says, “Infanticide, or child murder, is an enormity that our reason and feelings would lead us to reckon a crime of very rare occurrence. That it should exist at all is, at first view, surprising; that it should prevail to any extent is difficult of belief; that parents should be its perpetrators is in a high degree painful to imagine; but that mothers should be the executioners of their own offspring—nay, their habitual and systematic executioners—is such an agonizing contemplation, such an outrage on humanity, as every amiable feeling of our nature sickens and revolts at.”
The most awful feature of the matchless enormity is found in the fact that Hindooism has dared to cover the deed with a professed divine sanction. On page 399 we have described the bloody deity, herself a female, under whose sanction these deeds, so inhuman, have been consummated. A fitting locality, as a general center for the hellish enormity, was long since found in that dreary island
