or to mortgage part of their dwelling house or the land they hold on the meerassy tenure to raise funds for this purpose. There are instances also of persons of the lower classes (I have known instances of poor Brahmuns) who may have attained the prime of life without having been married, owing to the poverty or death of their parents, who borrowed money to enable them to enter into the matrimonial state. To redeem the obligation they have thus rendered themselves liable to, they enter into an engagement to serve the person who accommodated them with the loan for a certain number of years, at a fixed rate of wages, the creditor in the interim merely providing them food and clothing.

The task of explaining the abstract of their system of Judicial Astrology here applicable, will, I fear, be found to be very imperfectly executed and undeserving of any notice; as being nothing better than puerile trash, the meshes of its mysterious net being only calculated to enthral the minds of an enslaved and superstitious people for whom it was formed.

(To be continued.)

II.-On the state of Slavery in Southern India by A. D. Campbell, Esq. M. C. S.

(Extracted from Appendix to Report from Select Committee on the affairs of the East India Company.)

"

In the territories under the Madras Government, slaves are of two distinct descriptions: the one includes the great slave population termed agrestic slaves" or such as are usually employed in the field, though occasionally also in other labour. These consist exclusively of Hindoos, who become such by birth alone, in the peculiar castes which the usage of India has doomed to hereditary bondage. This species of slavery does not exist at all in the central provinces of the Indian peninsula, such as the Ceded Districts, or Mysore, peopled by the Carnatacka nation; and I believe it is also unknown in the Northern Circars, Nellore, &c. or in the country where the people speak the Telinga language; but it is common in the Southern provinces of the peninsula, or wherever the Tamil language is spoken, and it assumes its worst form on the western coast of the peninsula, or in the provinces of Malabar and Canara. The other description of slaves consists of those who may be termed domestic, from being employed only in the house itself. This kind of slavery may be found all over the Madras territory, but it is

exceedingly rare. Individuals generally become domestic slaves by being sold when children by their parents, in years of scarcity approaching to famine; for famine itself, in the British territories, is happily now nearly unknown, A Hindoo, however, who buys a child on such an occasion, treats it as a Briton would; not as a slave, but rather as a servant to whom food and raiment are due, and whose wages have been advanced to maintain the existence of the authors of its being, authorized by nature to contract for its service until it is old enough to confirm or cancel such compact. The text of the Hindoo law, as well as its practice, clearly maintains such compacts to be temporary only, for it expressly mentions the gift of two head of cattle as annulling them, and entitling the child to legal emancipation; but such fine is entirely nominal; it is never practically exacted; and on the child attaining maturity it is, in practice, as free amongst the Hindoos as amongst Britons, unless long habit or attachment induces it voluntarily to acquiesce in a continuation of its service. The Mussulman law acknowledges the legality of treating as slaves all infidels conquered by the faithful; but its text is entirely opposed to the purchase of free children for the purpose of reducing them to a state of bondage; yet, in practice, compacts such as are described above, confer permanent rights on the Mahomedan purchaser; for, under the spirit of proselytism which characterizes the Mussulman faith, a male infant is no sooner purchased than it is circumcised; and, whether male or female, it is invariably brought up in the Mahomedan creed, which, if it be a Hindoo (as is usually the case) irrevocably excludes it from all return to its parents or relations. Besides the purchase of children in years of scarcity, I have heard of natives, to cancel a debt, voluntarily selling themselves as domestic slaves for a certain number of years, but this is unusual; and though classed as a species of servitude, it more resembles that of persons serving under written articles in Europe, than slavery of even the most qualified description. There can also be no doubt that children are sometimes kidnapped and sold as slaves, without the knowledge of their parents. As superintendent of Police at Madras, I succeeded in 1818 in restoring several such children to their parents, amongst the lowest and poorest of the Hindoos; and their anxiety to recover infants, whom they in all probability found it very difficult to support, would have done honor to the highest classes of European Society. I may add, that from Malabar, a province on the western coast of the peninsula, where the ancient institutions of the Hindoo government have

descended to our own times nearly unimpaired, I recollect one trial having come before the Sudder Foujdary Court in 1830, in which the members of a high-caste Hindoo family, to conceal the disgrace to which they would have been exposed from retaining one of the daughters whose chastity was more than suspected, forcibly carried her off to a distant province, where they were taken up, on account of endeavouring to dispose of her as a domestic slave.

In the Madras provinces, it is the collectors and magistrates alone who can give any correct returns of the population. In the Bellary division of the Ceded Districts, where I first held that situation, I have already stated that no agrestic slaves whatever exist. In Tanjore, on the contrary, they amount to many thousands; but I cannot, from memory, give any correct estimate of their number. The house or domestic slaves in neither district can exceed one or two hundred, in a population of above a million of souls, in each of these provinces respectively.

There is no doubt that the Hindoo law recognizes slavery, domestic as well as agrestic, though practically amongst the Hindoos under the Madras Presidency, domestic slavery, as before explained, can hardly be said to exist, except as regards female children, occasionally purchased by dancing women, for the purpose of bringing them up to their own unhappy profession of prostitution, or the dancing women themselves, attached to the several Hindoo temples. I have already stated that the Mussulman code, though opposed in its text to the reduction of free Mahomedans to a state of bondage, not only recognizes and sanctions, in practice, slavery in general, especially that of conquered infidels, amongst whom it may fairly include the Hindoos, but encourages domestic slavery in particular, especially by the purchase of children, in order to increase, by their conversion, the number of the faithful. Notwithstanding the modification of the Hindoo and Mahomedan laws respecting slavery, recommended in the papers on that subject printed by order of the House of Commons, I am sorry to state that the Government of Madras have hitherto left them entirely unaltered by any enactment of their own. At the close, indeed, of the papers in question, notice is taken of a former enactment by the Government at Madras, contained in clause 14, Section 18, Regulation ii. 1812, prohibiting the exportation of slaves from the province of Malabar: but the result of the reference mentioned to have been made to the Advocate general, was the formal repeal of that enactment, on the just ground that the Act of Parliament of the 51 Geo. 3, c. 23, against the slave trade, sufficiently prohibits

this traffic by sea, and that its more severe penalties supercede those formerly established by the local Indian legislature. As connected with this subject, however, I may be here permitted to point out, that in any future Act of Parliament on the subject of India, a modification of the Slave Act above mentioned is imperatively called for. Offences against it, by traffic in slaves by sea, may take place in any part of the extensive coast, either on the Coromandel or on the western side of the peninsula, under the Madras Government, and by natives of distant provinces many hundred miles from the Presidency. The removal of such persons, with the witnesses on either side, from their own peculiar climate, as for instance, from Malabar to Madras, would be attended by an inevitable mortality, similar to that of Europeans, if sent for trial to the deadly climate of Sierra Leone: yet the Slave Act makes all offences under it, even when committed by natives in the provinces, cognizable only by the distant Admiralty, or King's Supreme Court of Judicature, confined to the Presidency itself, to the criminal jurisdiction of which they are otherwise not amenable. The local provincial courts, possessing power of life and death in matters of the highest criminal jurisdiction, ought, as regards a breach of the Slave Act, by natives in the interior, subject to their jurisdiction, to have power concurrent with that of the King's Court of Admiralty; for to carry into effect the law as it now stands in this respect, would, in such cases, be no less inhuman than revolting to the prejudices of the people. Indeed, like all laws at variance with the feelings of the people, the Slave Act, as it now stands, must remain a dead letter every where in the Madras territory, except at the Presidency, until Parliament give power to the tribunals in the provinces to enforce its penalties. In doing so, however, the punishment to be annexed to the breach of its provisions in the provinces should be proportioned to the punishment for other offences in the interior. Death is there the punishment of murder alone; transportation is the next grade of punishment, but never takes place except for life, on account of the great civil forfeiture of caste, by which, in India, it is ever attended; and confinement in fetters, or hard labour, for 14 and seven years respectively, alone are the punishments equivalent to transportation from England, for these several periods.

In regard to food, clothing, employment, treatment and comfort, there exists the greatest contrast between the domestic and agrestic Slaves in the territories under the Madras Government. The domestic slaves, confined principally to the Mahomedan families,

being brought up invariably in the creed of their master, are at once amalgamated with the family itself, who treat the males indulgently, with somewhat of that privileged familiarity allowed in all countries to those who are permanently attached to a family, and are rather its humble members by adoption, than its servants or slaves. They are well fed, well clothed, and employed in domestic offices, common, except in familes of the highest rank, to many of their master's relatives. The free communication with others, and facility of access to the British tribunals, which the want of all restraint over egress from the house, ensures to the male domestic slaves, combines with the indulgent treatment of their masters to qualify their bondage, so as nearly to exclude it from what the term slavery implies. Such, however, is not the lot of the female domestic slaves, employed as attendants on the seraglios of Mussulmans of rank: they are too often treated with caprice, and frequently punished with much cruelty. Once admitted into the haram, they are considered part of that establishment, which it is the point of honor of a Mussulman to seclude from all communication with others. The complaints made to me as superintendent of Police at Madras, against the Nabob of Arcot, and subsequently, when magistrate of Bellary, against the brother of the Nabob of Kurnool, gave me an insight into transactions committed in the recesses of the female apartments of these two personages, which has left on my mind a strong impression of the cruelty and wanton barbarity with which this class of female slaves are subject to be treated. The murder of more than one female slave, alleged to have been committed by the brother of the Nabob of Kurnool, induced me repeatedly to address the Madras Government; nor was it until he added to them the murder of his own wife that he was confined as a state prisoner, instead of being brought to trial for his life, as I suggested. Indeed little doubt can be entertained that the seclusion of female slaves in the harams of Mussulmans of rank, too often precludes complaint, prevents redress, and cloakes crimes at which Europeans would shudder. The agrestic slaves, on the other hand, are invaribly Hindoos of the lowest and most degraded castes, such as the Pullers, or outcasts altogether, such as the Parriahs in the Tamil country, residing usually in the out skirts of the village; food dressed by them being abomination, and their touch defilement to their masters. In Malabar, indeed, the master is attended, wherever he moves, by an imaginary halo; for the distance which the slave must keep from any of the pure castes including the lowest, or Soo