and Bombay, and the abolition of Suttee is now universally approved.[24]
Such is the educative influence of a good law. Perhaps a would-be
patriot may yet occasionally be heard so belauding the devotion of the
widows who burned themselves that his praise is tantamount to a lament
over the abolition of Suttee. But the general sentiment has been
completely changed since the first quarter of the nineteenth century,
when the Missionaries and some outstanding Indians like the Bengali
reformer Rammohan Roy agitated for the abolition of Suttee, and the
Government, convinced, still hesitated to put down a custom so generally
approved. In these changed times it will hardly be believed that
Rammohan Roy only ventured to argue against any form of compulsion being
put upon the widow, and that the orthodox champions of the practice
appealed against the abolition not only to the Governor-General, but
also to the King in Council,--the petition having been heard in the
House of Lords in 1832. But once more to return to the emancipation of
women by Acts of the Legislature. By another Act, in 1856, the Indian
Government abolished the legal restrictions to widow marriage. Still
another Act, in 1891, forbade cohabitation before the age of twelve; and
although fiercely opposed in the native press and in mass meetings, the
Act, which expressed the views of many educated Hindus, is now
apparently acquiesced in by all, and must be educating the community
into a new idea of marriage.

In five aspects the social inferiority of the female sex is still
apparent--namely, in the illiteracy of females, in marriage before
womanhood, in polygamy, in the seclusion of women, and in the
prohibition of the marriage of widows. Excepting the last, no one of
these customs is imposed by caste, nor is the last even in every caste.

[Sidenote: Their lack of education.]