The italics, as above, exist in the original (with the exception of those in Par. 3), and serve, singularly enough, to point for us a moral very much deeper than that intended. It is a happy fact that British feeling, supported by the growing sentiment of the more intelligent and educated of the native population, has effected even so slight an amelioration of law and custom, and we may hope for and press forward to further improvement. Though the utterance quoted above is only that of the Mahomedan section, it is, of course, understood that the law does not apply or point to them alone, but to all the peoples and sects of India; and that the approval of this legislation is also general among the enlightened of those other creeds. (See end of Note XVII., 8.) Singular confirmatory evidence as to the distressing prevalence of this child-marriage is incidentally given in the following paragraph from the _Times_ of 31st March, 1892:— “A correspondent of the _Times of India_ mentions some odd instances of minor difficulties which have occurred in the working of the amended Factory Act, which came into force in India at the commencement of the present year. The limit of age for ‘full-timers’ in factories is fixed at fourteen years, and as very few native operatives know their children’s ages, or even their own, the medical officer has, in passing lads and girls for work, to judge the age as best he can—generally, as in the case of horses, by examining their teeth. If he concludes that they are under fourteen, he reduces them to ‘half-timers.’ In one Bombay mill recently a number of girls were thus sent back as under age who were actually mothers, and several boys who were fathers were also reduced; and one of the latter was the father, it is said, of three children. The case of these lads is particularly hard, for, with a wife and child, or perhaps children, to support, life, on the pay of a ‘half-timer,’ must be a terrible struggle.”