There is the Plague, the Black Death: India invented it; India is the cradle of that mighty birth. The Car of Juggernaut was India's invention. So was the Suttee; and within the time of men still living eight hundred widows willingly, and, in fact, rejoicingly, burned themselves to death on the bodies of their dead husbands in a single year. Eight hundred would do it this year if the British government would let them. Famine is India's specialty. Elsewhere famines are inconsequential incidents--in India they are devastating cataclysms; in one case they annihilate hundreds; in the other, millions. India had 2,000,000 gods, and worships them all. In religion all other countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire. With her everything is on a giant scale--even her poverty; no other country can show anything to compare with it. And she has been used to wealth on so vast a scale that she has to shorten to single words the expressions describing great sums. She describes 100,000 with one word --a 'lahk'; she describes ten millions with one word--a 'crore'. In the bowels of the granite mountains she has patiently carved out dozens of vast temples, and made them glorious with sculptured colonnades and stately groups of statuary, and has adorned the eternal walls with noble paintings. She has built fortresses of such magnitude that the show-strongholds of the rest of the world are but modest little things by comparison; palaces that are wonders for rarity of materials, delicacy and beauty of workmanship, and for cost; and one tomb which men go around the globe to see. It takes eighty nations, speaking eighty languages, to people her, and they number three hundred millions. On top of all this she is the mother and home of that wonder of wonders caste--and of that mystery of mysteries, the satanic brotherhood of the Thugs.