the very time the British Parliament were again refusing in the
charter discussions of 1813 for another twenty years to tolerate
Christianity in its Eastern dependency, the Indian legislature
legalised the burning and burying alive of widows, who numbered at
least 6000 in nine only of the next sixteen years, from 1815 to 1823
inclusive.

>From Plassey in 1757 to 1829, three quarters of a century, Christian
England was responsible, at first indirectly and then most directly,
for the known immolation of at least 70,000 Hindoo widows. Carey
was the first to move the authorities; Udny and Wellesley were the
first to begin action against an atrocity so long continued and so
atrocious. While the Governor-Generals and their colleagues passed
away, Carey and his associates did not cease to agitate in India and
to stir up Wilberforce and the evangelicals in England, till the
victory was gained. The very first number of the Friend of India
published their essay on the burning of widows, which was thereafter
quoted on both sides of the conflict, as "a powerful and convincing
statement of the real facts and circumstances of the case," in
Parliament and elsewhere. Nor can we omit to record the opinion of
Carey's chief pundit, with whom he spent hours every day as a
fellow-worker. The whole body of law-pundits wrote of Sati as only
"permitted." Mritunjaya, described as the head jurist of the
College of Fort William and the Supreme Court, decided that,
according to Hindooism, a life of mortification is the law for a
widow. At best burning is only an alternative for mortification,
and no alternative can have the force of direct law. But in former
ages nothing was ever heard of the practice, it being peculiar to a
later and more corrupt era. "A woman's burning herself from the
desire of connubial bliss ought to be rejected with abhorrence,"