Page:Speeches And Writings MKGandhi.djvu/507

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their dry life a cheerful one. The man who marries a young girl does not do so out of any altruistic motives but through sheer lust. Who is to rescue these girls ? A proper answer to this question will also be a solu- tion of the woman's problem. The answer is albeit difficult, but it is only one. There is of course none to champion her cause but her husband. It is useless to expect a child-wife to be able to bring round the man who has married her. The difficult work must, there- fore, for the present at least be left to man. If I could, I would take a census of child wives and will find the friends as well as through moral and polite exhortations I will attempt, to bring home to them the enormity of their crime in linking their fortunes with child wives and will warn them that there is no expiation for that sin unless and until they have by education made their wives fit not only to bear children but also to bring them up properly and unless in the meantime they live a life of absolute celibacy.

QUIET AND UNOBTR USIVE WORK NEEDED.

Thus, there are many fruitful fields of activity before the members of the Bhagini Samaj for devoting their energies to. The field for work is so vast that if resolute application is brought to bear thereon the wider movements -for reform may for the present be left to themselves and great service can be done to the cause of Home Rule without so much as even a verbal reference to it. When printing presses were non-existent and scope for speech-making very limited, when ona could hardly travel twenty-four miles in the course of a day instead of a thousand miles as now, we had only one agency for propagating our ideals and that was our 'Acts' ; and acts had

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