120 Proceedings of the Boyal Society 
of men like Sir H. Maine and Sir George Campbell and other 
scholars who have applied their knowledge of the Aryan races in 
India to the elucidation of our Scotch archaic history has thrown 
much light on the subject; but I think a speech made a few 
weeks ago by Dr Hunter in the council of the viceroy on the 
treatment of the people of the Deccan is singularly illustrative of 
the subject I am now treating. “The peasantry of the Deccan,” 
he said, “have been suffering from economic causes sufficient to 
break the spirits and to ruin the fortunes of any race. Seventy-four 
years ago, when the Mahrattas and the peasantry of the Deccan 
passed under our Government, they had five great sources of liveli- 
hood. The economic and political changes brought about by 
British rule have deprived them of four of these sources and left 
them only one. In the first place, the Mahratta race had, during 
nearly two centuries, derived a large, although a fluctuating, income 
from war. Its pillaging invasions of wealthier provinces were 
reduced to a system of strictly mercantile adventure, which enriched 
alike the fort of the chief and the cottage of the peasant. For the 
Deccan hordes were not the accidental product of any single leader, 
but the natural result of an overflowing peasant population under 
the guidance of a hereditary administrative caste.” I thought I had 
read this before, and turning to Cosmo Innes’s charming essays on 
our early Scotch life, I found this : — “ The power of the chief or 
laird was measured by the number of men he could turn out under 
arms, and he had every inducement to maintain the full number of 
dwellings and inhabitants. In summer the people of the glen might 
exist upon the produce of their pasture lands, and there was a little 
corn for the beginning of winter, but for the rest of the year they 
must necessarily have sought sustenance elsewhere. They could 
not dig, to beg they were ashamed. There was a third alternative, 
they left their glens and lifted'' 
Dr Hunter goes on to show how the advance of civilisation 
has dried up the sources of the former wealth and even subsistence of 
the Deccan peasantry, and we could tell the same story of our own 
land ; the looms of Galashiels and Hawick have silenced those in 
the Highland glens, and all the manifold changes that railways and 
steamers have introduced into the habits of a people formerly so 
self-contained and self-suflicing have conduced to the reduction of 
* Innes, Scottish Legal Antiquities, p. 269, 
