JOURNAL

No. 214. NEW SERIES.

SOCIAL OUTLAWRY.

In almost every ancient and modern state assuming to be civilised, there has sprung up a class of persons deprived of the usual privileges of citizens, and in a sense outlaws. The commission of crimes, or other violations of the law, has of course been in all ages a common cause of expulsion from society; but history and experience too surely demonstrate that misfortune of birth, as in the flagrant case of the Pariah tribes of India, has been a greatly more prevalent source of this monstrous evil. The truth seems to be, that a disposition to do even-handed justice to the whole of its denizens irrespectively, is about the last concession made by any state-such being the force of inveterate prejudice and interest which requires to be overcome. Curiously enough, this dislike of justice is not exclusively or most frequently manifested by nations of a monarchical or aristocratic character. It happens in this, as in some other cases, that the aristocratic in name is perhaps the least aristocratic or exclusive in practice, and that the form of injury and injustice we speak of is most strongly maintained by people who themselves have suffered under a similar oppression. Let us select a few of the more flagrant instances of social outlawry.

Switzerland is reputed to be the freest country in Europe. This is an error, arising most likely from the common notion that the country is a confederacy of republics, which wrested its freedom from surrounding despotisms. It is one thing to throw off a foreign yoke, and another to establish internal freedom. Switzerland at the present day, with all its wonderful industry and spirit of liberality in matters of international trade, is, in point of fact, a cluster of little despotisms, the despots in each case being a majority of the population which oppresses the minority-oppression on the score of religion and of birth. Ignorance, and selfishness-which is only a manifestation of ignorance-are conjointly the cause of this discreditable state of affairs. Under the common name of Swiss, three great European races meet and nestle about the heart of the Alps-the French from the west, the German from the north and east, and the Italian from the south; and the want of communication, till of late years, has kept these races apart and ignorant of each other. Nowhere, also, is the distinction of religion more marked. Two-thirds of the Swiss are Protestant, and the remaining one-third Catholic; and the Protestant and Catholic cantons, as the recent civil war has shown, hate each other as the hostile clans in the Highlands hated each other two hundred years ago. Besides, though Switzerland, compared with most countries, is a land of mountains, the greater part of it is composed of plains amidst the stupendous Alps. Two hours' stiff climbing suffices to change from

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the neat-trimmed flower-garden and stuccoed cottage of the industrious artisan of Zurich, into the lofty hillcountry of Schweitz, where the mountaineer leads a half-vagabond existence, tending his numerous goats among storms and mist, while his children run ragged and barefooted along the road, begging from travellers. Between people so variously situated there can be little sympathy.

A consequence of this national disintegration has been, that the rights of citizenship possessed in one canton have always been good for nothing in another. The citizen of Geneva, who was driven to settle in the Valais, was allowed toleration; but neither he nor his posterity could, by any length of residence, become denizens of their adopted country. A Roman Catholic at Lucerne who turned Protestant, lost all his property, and was liable to banishment; a Protestant at Berne turning Roman Catholic, was punished in like manner. Several of the present cantons continued, up to the time of the French Revolution, to be vassals to the larger ones. Thus the canton of Berne was sovereign lord of the present cantons of Vaud, Uri, and Tessin, which it crushed with taxation, without admitting its subjects to any political rights whatever. Thus, in process of time, it came to pass that all over Switzerland there grew up a distinct body of men, the descendants of individuals who had lost their civil rights in their respective cantons, either in consequence of change of religion, or of misdemeanours for which they were sentenced to banishment, or of illegal marriages, or lastly, as foreigners settled in Switzerland. The stigma thus cast upon the fathers descended upon the children to the last generation. They formed a separate class called Heimathlosen-literally, the homelesspeople to whom the law allowed nothing-involuntary outlaws. They exist at the present moment in steadily - increasing numbers; and as injustice always reacts on itself, the parties so degraded form an organised body of mendicants, hucksters, pilferers, and often robbers, like the gipsies of other countries, but much more numerous, compact, and formidable to the society which has cast them out.

Some years ago, these Heimathlosen were become so troublesome, that their state was forced upon the attention of the Swiss diet, which instituted inquiries accordingly, the result of which is now before us. The report stated the Heimathlosen to amount to many thousands in number in all the central cantons, from the Lake of Geneva to the Grisons, beginning at the Hanenstein in canton Soleure on the west, and extending on the east beyond the Rhine into the Austrian principality of Lichtenstein. None of these thousands had any fixed trade, or were allowed by the law to possess a permanent house or lodging. When they ventured into the towns, they assumed, for the time, the characters of

thread-twisters, match-sellers, bird-catchers, and menders of pots and kettles. Whenever they might, they lived by choice in the woods and mountains, supporting themselves by all kinds of thievery. At night, they creep into caves, or sleep round a fire in the open air; and this through the depth of winter. Marriage is unknown among them; none of those examined could tell their own age, and very few knew who were their fathers and mothers. As soon as the children can walk, they are sent into the towns to beg and steal, and bring their plunder at night to the elder vagrants, who remain meantime encamped in the forests. They have still a voluntary government, and their leader at this time was a noted housebreaker named Krusikans, subsequently executed. Wherever and whenever discovered, they are liable to be imprisoned without cause assigned; and formerly, when the prisons were overcrowded, many were executed without even the formality of a trial. They are now, as soon as seized, escorted by troops to the boundaries of the canton, and thrust into the next, by which they are expelled in like manner, unless they can meantime escape. The report recommended various plans for absorbing this unwholesome population, which have been frequently since discussed; but nothing has been done, and the troubled state of the country renders any improvement now less likely

than ever.

Vaud was a few years ago the scene of some enormities on the score of religion, and while we now write, intelligence has reached England that the council of state of that canton, which is Presbyterian, has enacted that all religious meetings of parties, not in connexion with the authorised church, are illegal; public worship of all such bodies is accordingly put down by military force, and ministers are in danger of their lives. A more startling instance of the tyranny of a majority over a minority could scarcely be found in modern

times.

Let us proceed to another example. The West Indian Islands, during the last century, were troubled with a race of outlaws, whose existence is a curious corollary upon the working of the slave system. In all times and lands, one inevitable consequence of a legalised slavery is the constant tendency among the slaves to escape out of the pale of the society through which they are slaves, and thereby, as it frequently proves, to get beyond all laws whatsoever, the good as well as the bad. The timid suffer; and the bold, if they cannot throw off the yoke, fly from it as far as may be; and thus, by allowing freedom to none, the slave system generates a race of outlaws who subsist by war upon the body which has cast them out. It very rarely happens that a slaveholding country exists side by side with a free one, which may receive the refugce into its bosom, aud under the guardianship of its institutions. Slavery, besides, in a productive point of view, is only worth keeping up in a thin population where labour is dear, both from the want of competition and the ease of acquiring land. Among populations like these, the superior land only is tilled; the mountains, marshes, and forests subsist as nature made them, offering a ready refuge and an impregnable fortress in which the fugitives may collect and grow apart.

In the beginning of the eighteenth century, almost every West Indian island had its organised outlaws; hunters and robbers by turns, who, when game failed them, or prompted by revenge, stole into the cultivated flats, fired the canes, drove off the cattle, and often consummated their inroad with the massacre of the planter

and his family. So dreadful a scourge were they, that the early West India records treat of nothing else. In the smaller islands, where the cover was less, they were hunted down and exterminated like so many wild beasts: in the larger, they lasted longer. In all alike they bore the same title of Maroons, which some derive from a native word signifying wanderer,' and others from marrow,' the Spanish name for the wild hog, on which they principally lived.

There is a very full and curious account of the Jamaica Maroons in the works of Dallas and Bryan Edwards-the one a soldier, and the other a civilianwho look at their subject very differently, yet agree in most of their details. The year 1733 was the end of a lengthy, troublesome warfare, stained with much bloodshed on both sides, in which the damage done by the Maroons was roughly reckoned at L.240,000 sterling, besides a loss of from three to four thousand lives. For the next sixty years both parties lived at peace. A large tract was assigned to the Maroons, on which they hunted undisturbed, and where they built three small towns, or rather villages, the chief one called Trelawny Town. It would seem that a very few years of kindness, and attention to the introduction among them of humanising habits, would have sufficed to absorb them peacefully among the free black popula tion; but to take any trouble for a negro, never entered a planter's head in those days. The Maroons lived on hunting, as if in the middle of Africa-a kind of Pariahs, dreaded and neglected; and the planters lived on, heedless of the past and the coming peril, though Trelawny Town was only eighteen miles either way from the principal ports of Falmouth and Mondego Bay; and it needed but a three hours' march of the Maroons, as the event proved, to burn down half the sugar plantations in the island.

The slave emancipation act would have effectually dissolved this strange society, by destroying the causes which led to its existence; but it was destined to come insurrection broke out in St Domingo, and produced a to a more speedy and violent end. In 1794, the negro great effect among the blacks throughout the West Indies. In the following year the Maroons were in full revolt. The war which ensued lasted for a year and a half, and cost the island in direct expenditure more than half a million sterling; and all the plantstions were burned to ashes. Cultivation was at a stand, white population was drafted into the militia, and the the courts of justice were shut up, the whole male island at large became one entire garrison. We have no intention to go into the details of this miserable conflict. The Maroons were not six hundred in number; the regular infantry employed against them alone amounted to fifteen hundred, with eight thousand militia; but the nature of the country and warfare made this disparity of numbers of little effect. From powers of sight and hearing were incredibly acute; the precarious life which these savages had led, their with their bare feet and hands they could climb trees and cliffs like monkeys; and their aim was deadly: it was a common thing among them to strike a dollar with a bullet at one hundred yards. The whole country was a mass of forest and underwood, impassable except to the Maroons, who cut narrow paths through it known only to themselves, and would crawl for miles on hands and coming to an opening, their unerring muskets picked knees through the tracks made by the wild hogs, till, off our sentries, while the marksman was unseen. Driven at length from their towns, they retreated to a range of narrow glens in the interior, walled in by cliffs two hundred feet high, in which they continued as safe as in a fortress, till the English, by cutting a road, were with effect from the upper ground, when the Maroons enabled to bring up their heavy guns, and throw shells escaped at night through the cordon of troops, broke into small parties, and carried fire and sword through the island.

At last the Assembly, in the month of September,

utterly despairing of success, resorted to an expedient which no extremity could justify: they determined to send to Cuba for bloodhounds. The employment, according to Edwards, to which these dogs are generally put by the Spaniards, is the pursuit of wild bullocks, which they slaughter for the hides; and the great use of the dogs is to drive the cattle from such heights and recesses in the mountainous parts of the country as are least accessible to the hunters. Much opposition was made to the plan, as cruel and dastardly, reviving the worst atrocities of the Spaniards, and disgraceful to the British troops; but at length, on the 14th of December, a commissioner landed at Montego Bay with forty chasseurs, or Spanish hunters, and about a hundred dogs.

When these new allies were landed, the wild and formidable appearance of the men and dogs spread terror through the place. The streets were cleared, the doors were shut, not a negro ventured to stir forth, as the muzzled dogs, ferociously making at every object, and dragging forward the chasseurs, who with heavy rattling chains hardly held them in, proceeded onwards. Dallas, in his history, gives the following account of their first appearance before the commander-in-chief: 'Anxious to review the chasseurs, General Walpole left headquarters, the morning after they were landed, before daybreak, and arrived in a postchaise at Seven Rivers, accompanied by Colonel Skinner, whom he appointed to conduct the intended attack. Notice of his coming having preceded him, a parade of the chasseurs was ordered, and they were taken to a distance from the house, in order to be advanced when the general alighted. The Spaniards soon appeared at the end of a gentle acclivity, drawn out in a line containing upwards of forty men, with their dogs in front, and muzzled, and held by cotton ropes. On receiving the command "fire," they discharged their guns, and advanced as upon a real attack. This was intended to ascertain what effect would be produced on the dogs if engaged under the fire of the Maroons. The volley was no sooner discharged, than the dogs rushed forward with the greatest fury, amid the shouts of the Spaniards, who were dragged on by them with irresistible fury. Some of the dogs, maddened by the shouts of attack, while held back by the ropes, seized on the stocks of the guns in the hands of their keepers, and tore pieces out of them. Their impetuosity was so great, that they were with difficulty stopped before they reached the general, who found it necessary to get expeditiously into the chaise from which he had alighted; and if the most strenuous exertions had not been made to stop them, they would most certainly have seized upon his horses.'

This scene was well got up, and it had its effect. General Walpole was ordered to advance on the 14th of January following, with his Spanish dogs in the rear. Their fame, however, had reached the Maroons, and the general had penetrated but a short way into the woods, when a supplication for mercy was brought from the chemy, and 260 of them soon after surrendered, on no other condition than a promise of their lives. It is pleasing to observe,' adds Edwards, that not a drop of blood was spilt after the dogs arrived in the island.' Those who had actually borne arms were soon after transported to Halifax in North America, and ultimately to Sierra Leone, where it is believed their descendants are still to be found. A portion had sided throughout with the English. These have continued a separate people, employed by the authorities as local police, for which their perfect acquaintance with the woods, and capacity of endurance, completely fitted them; but partially civilised, and few in numbers, they differ in little from the rest of the free black population. In the British West Indies, the Maroons may be considered extinct.

France, which assumes to herself the leadership of European civilisation, still upholds slavery in her colonies; but these are too few and scanty to have much effect upon the progress of the emancipation struggle.

The largest of the French West Indian Islands (Guadeloupe) consists, in fact, of two islands, respectively called Grandeterre and Guadeloupe, separated by a salt-water channel, some thirty yards broad. Grandeterre is flat, cultivated, and thickly peopled, almost clear of wood, and without cover. Guadeloupe is one mass of rugged volcanic mountains, rising steeply from the sea, and rent by subterranean fires. In the midst towers the Souffrière, or Sulphur Mountain, to a height of 5500 feet above the sea, which is constantly smoking. There are ravines and caves enough to hide a dozen armies. The whole island is a maze of thickets, in which Columbus with his sailors were bewildered three centuries ago, and which remain in the same state at present.

When daylight

Many years ago, a slave ship from Africa, in attempting to beat up to Basseterre harbour, during the hurricaue months, came ashore on this coast. The crew took to their boats, and the slaves found no difficulty in knocking off their fetters and hiding themselves in the mountains. Once there, they were safe. Other runaways joined them; the negroes deserted by wholesale; and the united body took the name of Kellars-it is not known from what. The planters, for whom a neighbourhood like this was a continual peril, assembled in force to hunt them down, but did not even succeed in coming in sight of their light-footed foes. The same night the Kellars made a descent on the plain, and set fire to the sugar-canes. The wind was strong, and spread the flame, and nearly a half of the magnificent plantations were reduced to ashes. came, the incendiaries were invisible. Pursuit was impossible, and it was resolved to treat. A treaty was made accordingly, which, with few exceptions, has been kept steadily to the present time. The Kellars were allowed the free possession of their mountains, and on their side pledged themselves to commit no farther depredations. Matters remain on this footing at the present day. One half the island is populous, richly cultivated, and reflects across the Atlantic the civilisation of France, while the other half is a howling wilderness, in which the persistence of a nation calling itself Christian, in a system forbidden alike by Christianity and common sense, perpetuates on a smaller scale the barbarism of interior Africa, which will here, as in Jamaica, assuredly one day work out its own retribution.

It would be easy to multiply instances of social outlawry, or at least deprivation of social privilege. The unhappy coloured races throughout the greater part of the American continent offer the more flagrant examples; but others of lesser note haunt our own and other countries. In France, with all its revolutions and code-Napoleons, justice is denied to parties not naturalised; in other words, if one Englishman plunder another Englishman in France, the law admits of no redress. Some years ago, an Englishman who died in France bequeathed his property by will to the Phrenological Society of Edinburgh. The society claimed the money from the trustee, an Englishman in Paris. He resisted payment: the society brought the case into the French courts, and these finally determined that they could not interfere between foreigners! The trustee keeps the property, amounting to several thousand pounds! How different the law of Scotland! A Parisian tradesman sued Charles X. while at Edinburgh, before the Scottish Supreme Court, and the case was determined as if between two British subjects.

It appears to us that the privileges still claimed by royal burghs, and to the freedom of which they occasionally admit strangers, is a relic of the past, which it is time should be swept away. It amounts to this-that certain inhabitants, called burgesses or freemen, claim some kind of superiority of privilege over neighbours less fortunately situated. Think of an advocate of free trade being, by way of compliment to his principles, presented with the freedom of a city! If the presenters really love freedom, they ought long since to have de