medan Emperor and European governor, all failed to prevent or terminate, in the long experience of twenty-five centuries, was effected by the beneficent religion of Him who, in every age and in every land, has proved himself to be woman's greatest and truest friend.
The honored man who signed the prohibitory edict which ended this awful crime was Lord William Bentinck. He bore unappalled the brunt of native and European opposition. The highest English functionaries expressed their forebodings of danger from its forcible suppression, and the Brahmins protested and defended it, as a religious rite that must not be meddled with. Amid this storm of opposition and fears, and sustained by the sympathy and prayers of the missionaries and other good men, his Lordship, on the 4th of December, 1829, signed the act which ended this outrage on human nature and the laws of God. Widow-burning prevails still, to some extent, in those provinces of India not under the direct government of England. Two notable cases were recorded while I was in India—one in March, 1858, in the city of Aurungabad, in the dominions of the Nizam, and the other in August, 1859, at Koonghur. But the flag of Britain no longer waves over a suttee, and the governors are doing what they can to induce the native Princes to complete its suppression.
Lord Bentinck visited Behrole in 1832, in company with General Sleeman, and, pointing to some magnificent tombs of suttees, asked what they were. When told, he remained silent; but he must have felt at the moment the proud consciousness of the debt of gratitude which India and India's daughters owe to the statesman who had the Christian courage to put a stop to the great evil in spite of the fearful obstacles that opposed him.
O, Christian women of America! amid your happy homes, and the exalted privileges and honor with which the Cross has surrounded you, remember your sisters who are still in the bonds of this cruel idolatry! Urge on and extend the missions that are toiling there, until they penetrate to the very last of “the dark places” of India, where “the habitations of cruelty” still erect the suttee; and there
