declared that the night before the conquest the god had made known
its desire to be under British protection. This was joyfully
reported to Lord Wellesley's Government by the first British
commissioner. At once a regulation was drafted vesting the shrine
and the increased pilgrim-tax in the Christian officials. This Lord
Wellesley indignantly refused to sanction, and it was passed by Sir
George Barlow in spite of the protests of Carey's friend, Udny. In
Conjeeveram a Brahmanised civilian named Place had so early as 1796
induced Government to undertake the payment of the priests and
prostitutes of the temples, under the phraseology of "churchwardens"
and "the management of the church funds." Even before the Madras
iniquity, the pilgrims to Gaya from 1790, if not before, paid for
authority to offer funeral cakes to the manes of their ancestors and
to worship Vishnoo under the official seal and signature of the
English Collector. Although Charles Grant's son, Lord Glenelg, when
President of the Board of Control in 1833, ordered, as Theodosius
had done on the fall of pagan idolatry in A.D. 390, that "in all
matters relating to their temples, their worship, their festivals,
their religious practices, their ceremonial observances, our native
subjects be left entirely to themselves," the identification of
Government with Hindooism was not completely severed till a recent
period.

The Charak, or swinging festival, has been frequently witnessed by
the present writer in Calcutta itself. The orgie has been
suppressed by the police in great cities, although it has not ceased
in the rural districts. In 1814 the brotherhood thus wrote home:--

"This abominable festival was held, according to the annual custom,
on the last day of the Hindoo year. There were fewer gibbet posts