OCR Rendition - approximate

320 SIR H. B. FRERE.-On the laws affecting t7te not marked by the remains of Roman stations, so placed as effectually to command the communications and trade. Of the results of Roman occupation on civil administration and on social and political life in Britain we have fewer remains, but they are sufficient to show how wise, with a view to permanent empire, was the policy adopted. The native chiefs and rulers were subsidised, and as far as possible Romanised-and apparently the details of local administration were conducted through them with the result of gradually settling and civilizing the barbarian British tribes who remained in the open country. The fiercer and more untameable tribes were pushed back into the mountainous regions of Wales and North Britain, and there shut in by good military frontier roads, communicating between strong fortified posts, the fortifications being sometimes continuous for long distances. In the open country, administered under Imperial authority, great progress seems to have been made during two or three centuries in assimilating the social and municipal life of the people to that of the older provinces of the Empire. The remains of fortified towns with their baths and temples, of country villas which had evidently been the abode of leisurely and even luxurious civilized occupants-and other remains of the Roman period-concur with the somewhat meagre written historical records in showing that before the Romans left the island, life in Roman Britain had become at least as much assimilated to life in the older provinces of the Empire, as life in our colonies is to the English life of the present day. (Let me note in passing that a system of securing military possession of the country precisely similar in principle to that adopted by the Romans in Great Britain was inculcated on Sir Harry Smith by the Duke of Wellington, when discussing the Kaffir War in which Sir Harry Smith was engaged ; and the system so inculcated was practically carried out by Sir George Cathcart, whose volume of despatches from South Africa lays down a complete system for securing military possession of British Kaffraria, including the Amatola mountains, such as might have been dictated by Julius Caesar or Agricola) The question, What was the result on the bulk of the native British population ? has next to be considered. There is much evidence to prove that the total population of the southern part of the island must have greatly increased during the Roman occupation. The greater part of whatever population existed was probably of aboriginal races, for except to retired soldiers or traders who had lived here previously, there was little to tempt emigrants from southern Europe or Greece to settle here, and till late in the period of Roman sway, we