MIXED POPULATION. 
275 
The CoDquest, 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 tliose 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 tiom 
■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 diflTerent 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 eha- 
ractorizes 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 urinciples 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 simround 
T 2 
