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"There is a malaria in the atmosphere of these regions, which the new comer shuns, as being deleterious to his views and habits. See the wide-spreading ruin which the avarice of our ancestral government has produced in the South, as witnessed in a sparse population of freemen, deserted habitations, and fields without culture! Strange to tell, even the wolf, driven back long since by the approach of man, now returns, after the lapse of a hundred years, to howl over the desolations of slavery."

Mr. Moore, also a member of the Legislature of Virginia, in speaking of the evils of slavery, said:

"The first I shall mention is the irresistible tendency which it has to undermine and destroy everything like virtue and morality in the community. If we look back through the long course of time which has elapsed since the creation to the present moment, we shall scarcely be able to point out a people whose situation was not, in many respects, preferable to our own, and that of the other States, in which negro slavery exists.

"In that part of the State below tide-water, the whole face of the country wears an appearance of almost utter desolation, distressing to the beholder. The very spot on which our ancestors landed, a little more than two hundred years ago, appears to be on the eve of again becoming the haunt of wild beasts."

Mr. Rives, of Campbell county, said:

"On the multiplied and desolating evils of slavery, he was not disposed to say much. The curse and deteriora ting consequence were within the observation and expe rience of the members of the House and the people of Vir ginia, and it did not seem to him that there could be two opinions about it."

Mr. Powell said:

"I can scarcely persuade myself that there is a solitary gentleman in this House who will not readily admit that slavery is an evil, and that its removal, if practicable, is a consummation most devoutly to be wished. I have not heard, nor do I expect to hear, a voice raised in this Hall to the contrary."

In the language of another, "we might multiply ex tracts almost indefinitely from Virginia authorities-tes tifying to the blight and degradation that have overtaken the Old Dominion, in every department of her affairs. Her commerce gone, her agriculture decaying, her land falling in value, her mining and manufactures nothing, her schools dying out,-she presents, according to the testimony of her own sons, the saddest of all pictures that of a sinking and dying State." Every year leaves her in a worse condition than it found her; and as it is with Virginia, so it is with the entire South. In the terse language of Governor Wise, "all have grown poor together." The black god cf slavery, which the South has worshipped for two hundred and thirty-seven years, is but a devil in disguise; and if we would save ourselves from being engulphed in utter ruin we must repudiate this foul god, for a purer deity, and abandon his altars for a holier

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shrine. No time is to be lost; his fanatical adorers, the despotic adversaries of human liberty, are concocting schemes for the enslavement of all the laboring classes' irrespective of race or color. The issue is before us; we cannot evade it; we must meet it with firmness, and with unflinching valor.

What it was that paralyzed the tongues of all those members of the Virgina Legislature, who, at the session of 1831-32, distinguished themselves by advocating a system of emancipation, is a mystery that has never yet been solved. Whether any or all of them shared a division of spoils with a certain newspaper editor, we have no means of knowing; but if all accounts be true, there was consummated in Richmond, in the latter part of the year 1832, one of the blackest schemes of bribery and corruption that was ever perpetrated in this or any other country. We are assured, however, that one thing is certain, and it is this: that the negro population of Virginia was very considerably and suddenly decreased by forcible emigration-that a large gang was driven further South, sold, and the proceeds divided among certain renegades and traitors, who, Judas-like, had agreed to serve the devil for a price.

We would fain avoid all personalities and uncomplimentary allusions to the dead, but when men, from love of lucre, from mere selfish motives, or from sheer turpitude of heart, inflict great injuries and outrages on the public, their villainy ought to be exposed, so that others may be deterred from following in their footsteps. As a general rule, man's moral nature is, we believe, so strong

that it invariably prompts him to eschew vice and prac tice virtue-in other words, to do right; but this rule, like all others, has its exceptions, as might be most strik ingly illustrated in the character of and some half-dozen or more of his pro-slavery coadjutors. From whose hands did this man receive fifty thousand dollars-improperly, if not illegally, taken from the public funds in Washington? When did he receive it?and for what purpose?-and who was the arch-demagogue through whose agency the transfer was made? He was an oligarchical member of the Cabinet under Mr. Polk's administration in 1845,-and the money was used, and who can doubt intended?-for the express purpose of establishing another negro-driving journal to support the tottering fortunes of slavery. From the second volume of a valuable political work, "by a Senator of thirty years," we make the following pertinent extract:

"The Globe was sold, and was paid for, and how? becomes a question of public concern to answer; for it was paid for out of public money-those same $50,000 which were removed to the village bank in the interior of Pennsylvania by a Treasury order on the fourth of November, 1844. Three annual installments made the payment, and the Treasury did not reclaim the money for these three years; and, though traveling through tortuous channels, the sharpsighted Mr. Rives traced the money back to its starting point from that deposit. Besides, Mr. Cameron, who had control of the village tank, admitted before a committee of Congress, that he had furnished money for

the payments--an admission which the obliging Committee, on request, left out of their report. Mr. Robert J. Walker was Secretary of the Treasury during these three years, and the conviction was absolute, among the close observers of the course of things, that he was the prime contriver and zealous manager of the arrangements which displaced Mr. Blair and installed Mr. Ritchie."

Thus, if we are to believe Mr. Benton, in his "Thirty Year's View," and we are disposed to regard him as good authority, the Washington Union was brought into existence under the peculiar auspices of the ostensible editor of the Richmond Enquirer; and the two papers, fathered by the same individual, have gone hand in hand for the last dozen or thirteen years, the shameless advocates and defenders of human bondage. To suppose that either has been sustained by fairer means than it was commenced with, would be wasting imagination on a great improbability. Both have uniformly and pertinaciously opposed every laudable enterprise that the white non-slaveholder has projected; indeed, so unmitigated has been their hostility to all manual pursuits in which their stupid and vulgar slaves can not be employed to advantage--and if there is any occupation under the sun in which they can be employed to good advantage, we know not what it is— that it is an extremely difficult matter to find a respectable merchant, mechanic, manufacturer, or business man of any calling whatever, within the bounds of their circu lation.

We have been credibly informed by a gentleman from Powhattan county, in Virginia, that in the year 1836 or