Rensselaer Standard, Volume 1, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 October 1879 — Human Sacrifices in India. [ARTICLE]

Human Sacrifices in India.

The British Government has at last succeeded in putting down the secret society of religious murderers in India caliedThugs, who. in the servise of their Soddess Doorga, strangled and plunered travelers. The laborious process of hunting them out occupied thirty years, and it is only lately that some of the miscreants were brought before the Prince of Wales, one of whom boasted of having committed murders with his own hand. The god Juggernaut is no longer suffered by the government to crush the devotees who fling themselves under his chariot wheels. It is not long since a host of human sacrifices were offered by certain non-Brahinin tribes; the village were this took place used to purchase for the purpose men, womed and cheldren, the so-called Meriahs. British officers have had the difficult task of effecting the deliverance of these Meriahs and the suppression of the sacrifices, partly by force and partly by gentle means. A single officer, Major Campbell in the course of eighteen years, according to the Contemporary Review, rescued 1,500 men doomed to the sacrificial death. It requires watchfulness and energy of of the British Officials to put down the practice of Suttee, and the allowing widows to marry again were an attack on the Brahmist religious system, and reckoned among the pretexts for the Sepoy mutiny. The value of human life is to a Hindoo infinitely below that of a cow; he would rather kill ten men than injure one cow.