Another subject was brought to my attention. I did not desire to know about it as in my life and the circumstances of my birth, I had been compelled to know so much of the degradation of mankind in licentiousness that any reference to it fills me with disgust and makes me wonder how a just God or decent people could tolerate such iniquity. I was informed that sexual vice was so prevalent that scarcely any one, from the highest down to the lowest classes, was not blackened by it. It was so foul a story that I soon stopped it with a request that I be told no more. Zola could come to Calcutta and write a score of books, not from his imagination, but of real facts, with names of living men and women involved in seductions, intrigues and foul crime that would astonish the world. Some one should do it, unmask these hypocrites as he would report a den of thieves, reveal the sources of some fearful epidemic or anything inimical to the well being of mankind. What surprised me most was that the prominent actors in all this, are in “Society,” and many or all of them professed Christians, pretended followers of the pure and holy Jesus! They have, perhaps, such unbounded faith in him that they dare revel in vice to their lust’s content, and think that at the end of life his blood will wash all their guilty stains away. What a delusive, deceptive, accursed belief! One reflection of mine was, what a story the Monument on the Maidan could tell if it only had a voice? It must have heard and seen so much of wrong-doing that if it had any feelings it must have had many a heart ache. Professor Hitchcock, writing upon light in the formation of pictures, says: “It seems then, that this photographic influence pervades all nature, nor can we say where it stops. We do not know, but it may imprint upon the world around us our features as they are modified by various passions, and thus fill nature with daguerrotype impressions of all our actions; it may be too, that there are tests by which nature, more skillful than any photographist, can bring out and fix these portraits so that acuter senses than ours shall see them as on a great canvas spread over the material universe? Perhaps, too, they may never fade from that canvas, but become specimens in the great picture gallery of eternity.” What if the monument has photographs and phonographs of all it has seen and heard and some day, some acuter scientist than now living comes along and reproduces all these scenes and voices in a historical panorama! What a consternation it would produce! What worse hell could there be to some people than the eternal possession of such a picture in which they would appear in their real characters stripped of all disguises and hypocrisies?