in certain communities within the state of Baroda to celebrate marriages only once every twelve years, female infants and girls of ten and twelve being then “happily despatched” together.  With that custom and with the new Act together, it would necessarily happen that girls of eleven at the general marrying time would have to wait twelve years more, or until their twenty-third year.  Since in some parts of India there is a saying about women “Old at twenty,” that delay would not do.  All educated young men may be said to hold the new ideas in these marriage matters.  Students now regard it with regret and some sense of a grievance when their guardians have married them in their school or college years.  The only alleviation to their minds is when the dowry which they bring into the family at their marriage helps to endow a sister who has reached the marriage age, or to educate a brother or pay off the family debts.  Among educated people too, the idea that the other world is closed to bachelors and childless men has died, although a daughter unmarried after the age of puberty is still a stigma on the family.  Do British readers realise that in an Indian novel of the middle and upper classes there can hardly be a bride older than twelve; there can be no love story of the long wooing and waiting of the lovers?

[Sidenote:  Polygamy.]

As regards polygamy, the Census shows 1011 married women for every 1000 married men, so that apparently not more than 11 married men in every 1000 are polygamists.  But polygamy is still an Indian institution, in the sense that it is at the option of any man to have more than one wife; in the matter of marriage, the rights of man alone are regarded.  All over India, however, among the educated classes, Mahomedans excepted, public opinion is now requiring a justification for a second marriage, as, for example, the barrenness, insanity, infirmity, or misconduct of the first spouse.  The temptation of a second dowry is still, however, operative with men of certain high castes in which bridegrooms require to be paid for.  The writer well remembers the pitiful comic tale of a struggling brahman student of Bengal, whose home had been made unhappy by the advent of two stepmothers in succession alongside of his own mother.  The young man did not blame his father, for his father disapproved of polygamy, and was a polygamist only because he could not help himself.  It had come about in an evil hour when he was desperate for a dowry for his eldest daughter, now come of marriageable age.  He had listened to the village money-lender’s advice that he might take a second wife himself and transfer to the daughter the dowry that the second wife would bring.  Then in like manner the lapse of time had brought a second daughter to the marriage age, the necessity for another dowry, and a third mother into the student’s home.  The poor fellow himself was married too, and one could not resist the conjecture that his marriage was another sacrifice for the family, and that his marriage had saved his father from bringing home yet another stepmother.  The redeeming feature of the story—­the strength of Indian family ties—­let us not be blind to.