belief thrust forcibly upon their attention. In most countries such street controversies are rigidly suppressed. Where they are permitted, they ought surely to be deemed a matter of tolerance, and not of right; to be regulated in each case according to special circumstances. Some years ago it was the habit of a Protestant missionary society to placard the walls throughout the Catholic provinces of Ireland with questions and arguments subversive of the Catholic faith, and missionaries might be seen driving along the roads throwing controversial leaflets to every peasant, and into every turf-basket as they passed. In my own judgment, such a method of propagandism ought not to have been permitted, and it is probable that most of those who disagree with me would admit the principle for which I am contending, if the arguments that were disseminated had been directed, not against Catholicism, but against Christianity. In France, where a stringent law forbids meetings in the streets, it has been, under the Republic, a common thing to see profane and often obscene caricatures of the most sacred persons and incidents in the Evangelical narratives publicly exposed. The prohibition of such placards in the streets would surely not be a violation, but a vindication, of liberty.

In India, questions of religious liberty of great delicacy and difficulty have arisen. For a long period it was the steady policy of the British Government not only itself to maintain an attitude of strict religious neutrality, but also to discourage proselytism as a grave danger to public order. The English,' Lord Macartney declared, never attempt to disturb or dispute the worship or tenets of others; . . . they have no priests or chaplains with them, as have other European nations.' In 1793, when the charter of the East India

Company was renewed, Wilberforce endeavoured to procure the insertion of clauses to the effect that it was the duty of the English to take measures for the religious and moral improvement of the natives in India, and that the Court of Directors should for that purpose send out and maintain missionaries and schoolmasters, as well as chaplains and ministers for those of their own creed. Owing to the strenuous resistance of the East India directors and proprietors, these clauses were struck out of the Bill at the third reading; the Company for many years refused to grant licenses to missionaries, and they more than once exercised against missionaries the power they possessed of expelling unlicensed Europeans from India. It was not until 1813 that Parliament broke down the barrier, and threw open the doors of India to missionary efforts. It did so in spite of a great preponderance of Anglo-Indian opinion, and of the evidence of Warren Hastings, and this measure marks most conspicuously the increasing power which the Evangelical party was exercising in British politics.1

2

But although India was from this time thrown open to numerous missionary enterprises, the law forbade and forbids, in terms much stricter than would be employed in British legislation, any word or act which could wound religious feelings, and the State endeavours to maintain its own religious neutrality, and to abstain as far as possible from any act that could conflict with the religious feelings, observances, and customs of the subject races. It has not, however, always

1 Strachey's India; Wilberforce's Life, ii. 24-28, 392-93; iv. 101-26. See, too, on the history of the relations of British law to native religions,

Kaye's Christianity in India, and Marshman's Lives of Carey, Marshman, and Ward.

2

Stephen's History of Criminal Law, iii. 312-13.

been able to do so. It seems an easy thing to guarantee the free exercise of different forms of worship, but grave difficulties arise when these religions bring with them a code of ethics essentially different from that of the ruling power. Probably the first instance in which the British Government undertook to prohibit a religious observance in India was in 1802, when Lord Wellesley suppressed under severe penalties the sacrifice of children by drowning, which took place annually at the great religious festival at Saugor. The slaughter of female infants, though it does not appear to have grown out of religious ideas, was fully recognised by Hindu morals, and it was practised on such a scale that within the memory of living men there were great districts in which not a single girl could be found in many villages. English law has made this act a crime, and some legislation which is as recent as 1870 has done much to suppress it. The human sacrifices that were once constantly performed before the images of Kali, and were not unfrequent at other shrines, have been abolished, and in 1829 Lord William Bentinck took the bold and most beneficent step of abolishing the suttee, or the practice of immolating Hindu widows on the funeral piles of their husbands.

The horrible fact that several hundreds of women were annually burnt alive within the British dominions, and in the immediate neighbourhood of Calcutta, had long occupied the thoughts of British governors, but the practice was so essentially a religious rite that for a long time they did not venture to forbid it. Lord Cornwallis directed public servants to withhold their consent from the ceremony, if it was asked for, but he prohibited them from taking any official step to pre

1 1 Strachey's India, pp. 290–91.

vent it. Lord Wellesley consulted the judges about the possibility of suppressing it, but in their opinion such a step would be extremely dangerous. In 1813, Lord Minto, while disclaiming all intention of forbidding it, or of interfering with the tenets of the native religions, undertook at least to introduce some limitations and regulations with the object of diminishing its barbarity. According to the new regulations, it could only be practised after communication with the magistrates and principal officers of police, and in the presence of the police, and they were directed to ascertain that the widow's act was purely voluntary, that no stupefying or intoxicating drugs were employed, that there was up to the very last no violence or intimidation, that the victim was not under the age of sixteen and not pregnant. There does not, however, appear to have been much diminution of the practice, and in 1828, the year preceding its suppression, it was officially reported that 463 widows had been burnt, 287 of them being in the Calcutta division alone.' In the ten previous years the annual number of immolations is said to have averaged not less than 600.

The measure of Lord William Bentinck excited many fears and much opposition. It was argued that the practice of suttee had existed for countless centuries in India; that it was in the eyes of the Hindus 'a religious act of the highest possible merit,' a‘sacred duty' and a 'high privilege;' that to prohibit it was a direct and grave interference with the religion of the Hindus, a manifest violation of the principle of complete religious liberty which the British Government had hitherto maintained and guaranteed. Great fears were entertained that the sepoy army in Bengal might resent

1 Mill's History of India, ix. 189.

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