laws, and the extension of education and missionary teaching, are steadily tending to the reduction of the number, by lowering the popular respect for the lazy crew that have so long consumed the industry of the struggling and superstitious people.
The expense of supporting them, at the lowest estimate—say two rupees per month for each Fakir—involves a drain of $12,000,000 per annum upon the industry of the country—a sum equal to what is contributed for the support of all the Christian clergy of the United States. Yet this is only one item of what their religion costs the Hindoos. Besides this come the claims of the regular priesthood, then of the Brahmins, then of the astrologers, encomiasts, etc., which this system creates—and Ward says they, with the Fakirs, make up in Bengal about one eighth of the population—millions of men year after year thus sponging upon their fellows, and engendering the ignorance, the superstition, the vice, the mendicity, the sycophancy, that necessitate a foreign rule in their magnificent land, as the only arrangement under which the majority could know peace, and be safe in possession of the few advantages which they enjoy. Truly heathenism—and above all Hindoo heathenism—is an expensive system of social and national life for any people. Error and vice don't pay. They are dearer far than truth and virtue under any circumstances.
Welcoming to their ranks, as they did, every vagabond of ability who had an aversion to labor, before the introduction of the British rule, these Fakirs, under pretenses of pilgrimages, used to wander, like the Gypsies of the West, over the country in bands of several thousands, but holding their character so sacred that the civil power dare not take cognizance of their conduct; so they would often lay entire neighborhoods under contribution, rob people of their wives, and commit any amount of enormities. In Dow's “Ferishta,” Vol. III, there is a singular account of a combination of them, twenty thousand strong, raising a rebellion against the Emperor Aurungzebe, selecting as their leader an old woman named Bistemia, who enjoyed a high fame for her spells and great skill in the magic art. The Emperor's general was something of
