'Professor Chantemesse, Director-General of the Public Health Department, made a somewhat disquieting statement at to-day's meeting of the Academy of Medicine. He pointed out that the cholera epidemic, which originated in India and spread east and west, had established itself last autumn in four European centres, namely Transcaspia, Transcaucasia, Anatolia, and the banks of the Volga between Astrakhan, Saratoff, and Samara. As the winter cold had merely checked the disease, instead of stamping it out, there was every reason to fear it would continue its progress westward, by way of the Baltic ports, the Black Sea, the Danube, or Constantinople.' According to another account, 'seven thousand deaths from cholera occurred in the Punjab since the second week of April. The disease was originally disseminated by the returning pilgrims from Hardwar.'

Of course there were also many Hindu pilgrims at the Hardwar fair, but let any one consider what a gain it would be to the world if the one hundred thousand Sikhs[1] who attended it possessed such a very elementary, knowledge of their religion as to know that their action was reprobated by all their holy Gurus.

It is known to every Sikh that tobacco is forbidden by his religion, but it is not generally known that wine is equally forbidden. After I had quoted the Sikh tenets on this subject in public lectures at Simla, it was taken up by the enlightened Singli Sabha of Patiala; and a resolution in favour of total abstinence was signed by several of the best educated and most influential Sardars of the State.

[1. At my, request the Panjab Government ascertained from the Government of the United Provinces the approximate population of the Sikh pilgrims.]

{p. xxii}

The freedom of women and their emancipation from the tyranny of the parda, may be inferred from the manner in which Bhai Budha received Mata[1] Ganga the wife of Guru Arjan, from Guru Amar Das's refusal to receive a rani who had visited him when she was closely veiled, and from Kabir's address to his daughter-in-law.

The high moral and enlightened teachings of the Gurus, their prohibition of the heinous crime of infanticide, and other injunctions for the public advantage will be found or understood from the composition of the Gurus and the Bhagats which we give in these volumes.

The Hindu practice of the concremation of widows was forbidden by the Gurus; though this was not generally known at the time of Lord William Bentinck, who had sufficient courage to issue an ordinance against it.

The Gurus most powerfully and successfully attacked the caste system and the Hindu belief in impurity and defilement in many necessary and harmless acts of domestic life.