the commencement; for the above number, dividing the one hundred millions of women in India, gives but one in two thousand five hundred and twenty-two who are receiving instruction, a number equal only to what this country would have to-day were but one American lady in five hundred and four blessed with education. What need is there, then, to urge on the glorious toil of rescuing India's daughters from the intellectual abominations which desolate their soul and mind in this fearful manner!
The sad story of the wrongs of woman in India will be told after we have traced the rise and fall of the great Rebellion; for the mitigations of her condition, which Christian law had in mercy enforced, were then put forward by her Brahminical oppressors as one of the reasons why they had renounced their allegiance to British rule.
But there is one class of women, and it is a very large class, in India, who are under no such restrictions and jealous seclusion as the lady on the former page. These court publicity, and you can see them every-where. This order of females are released from the doom of an illiterate mind. They can read, write, and quote the poets, and jest with the conundrums and “wise saws” of the land. The writer has known of attempts made by this class of girls to enter our schools in order to add the English tongue to their acquisitions, to be used by them for the worst of purposes. These are the “Nauch Girls,” a portrait of one of whom, from a photograph, is here given as she appears in public.
Their title means dancing-girls. No man in India would allow his wife or daughter to dance, and as to dancing with another man, he would forsake her forever, as a woman lost to virtue and modesty, if she were to attempt it. In their observation of white women, there is nothing that so much perplexes them as the fact that fathers and husbands will permit their wives and daughters to indulge in promiscuous dancing. No argument will convince them that the act is such as a virtuous female should practice, or that its tendency is not licentious. The prevalence of the practice in “Christian” nations makes our holy religion—which they suppose
