MIXED POPULATION. 275 



The Conquest, on the continent of Spanish America, and 

 the slave-trade in the West Indies, in Brazil, and in the 

 southern parts of the United States, have brought together 

 the most heterogeneous elements of population. This 

 strange mixture of Indians, whites, negroes, mestizos, mu- 

 lattoes, and zambos, is accompanied by all the perils which 

 violent and disorderly passion can engender, at those critical 

 periods when society, shaken to its very foundations, begins 

 a new era. At those junctures, the odious principle of the 

 Colonial System, that of security, founded on the hostility 

 of castes, and prepared during ages, has burst forth with 

 violence. Fortunately the number of blacks has been so 

 inconsiderable in the new states of the Spanish continent, 

 that, with the exception of the cruelties exercised in Vene- 

 zuela, where the royalist party armed their slaves, the 

 struggle between the independents and the soldiers of the- 

 mother country was not stained by the vengeance of the 

 captive population. The free men of colour (blacks, mulat- 

 toes, and mestizoes) have warmly espoused the national 

 cause; and the copper-coloured race, in its timid distrust 

 and passiveness, has taken no part in movements from, 

 which it must profit in spite of itself. The Indians, long 

 before the revolution, were poor and free agriculturists; 

 isolated by their language and manners, they lived apart 

 from the whites. If, in contempt of Spanish laws, the cupi- 

 dity of the corregidores and the tormenting system of the 

 missionaries often restricted their liberty, that state of 

 vexatious oppression was far different from personal slavery 

 like that of the slavery of the blacks, or of the vassalage of 

 the peasantry in the Sclavonian part of Europe. It is the 

 small number of blacks, it is the liberty of the aboriginal 

 race, of which America has preserved more than eight mil- 

 lions and a half without mixture of foreign blood, that cha- 

 racterizes the ancient continental possessions of Spain, and 

 renders their moral and political situation entirely different 

 from that of the West Indies, where, by the disproportion 

 between the free men and the slaves, the principles of the 

 Colonial System have been developed witn more energy. 

 In the West Indian archipelago, as in Brazil (two portions 

 of America which contain near 3,200,000 slaves), the fear of 

 among the blacks, and the perils that surround 



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