OCR Rendition - approximate

314 SIR H. B. FRERE.-On the Laws affecting the and with very practical results, as arguments for slavery and slave trade in the Southern States of the American Union-in East and South Africa and Brazil ; and the examples of the Carib inhabitants of the West Indies-the North American Indians-and the Maories, have been adduced as recent proofs of the impossibility. Let us look at the historical evidence on the subject. In India it is clear that from the earliest immigrations of the Aryan races up to the present time, the civilized immigrants have always been in contact with uncivilized and more aboriginal races. We find clear evidence of such contact, and of the warfare to which it led, in the earliest poetical legends of the contests between the gods and demi-gods of Hindu mythology and the demons and spirits of mountain and forest-whom it was the office of the heaven-born race to conquer or destroy. We see the battles and other events of the contests depicted in the earliest efforts of Hindu sculpture and paintings, and we find the contest still going on under the native dynasties which immediately preceded the British dominion in India. And what has been the result? The civilized Aryan immigrants have everywhere dispossessed their more aboriginal and less civilized predecessors of the lordship of the soil in the open and plain country, not always of the ownership and right of occupation as cultivators of the soil, but almost invariably of something more than the highest rights of sovereignty. It is very rare to find in the plain open country of India any petty chief of any aboriginal race (I know but of one in the Deccan, the Berud chief of Serapoor), and there are no great chiefs or sovereigns of such races, though the oldest and most powerful of Rajput sovereigns cannot be formally and securely seated on his ancestral throne till the Bhil Headman has marked the Maharaja's forehead with blood drawn from the Bhil's own arm. Nor in old times could a Rajput or Maharatta fortress be built with any certainty in popular estimation, of permanence or safety, till the Headman of the Bhil or other aboriginal race-or his child, or some equivalent victim-had been buried under the foundation of a keep or corner tower. These are intelligible indications of the popular belief that without the aboriginal agency the safety of the dynasty or of the edifice set up by the intruder cannot be assured. As a general rule, in the open country the uncivilized aborigines, when subdued, were incorporated into the community organised by the intruding race, and were settled on the land, sometimes as cultivating serfs-sometimes and more frequently as