little and unpretending as she is, does the same thing, with the exception of Virginia. Look at the facts as presented in the tables, and let your own eyes, physical and intellectual, confirm you in the truth.

And yet, forsooth, the slave-driving oligarchy would whip us into the belief that agriculture is not one of the leading and lucrative pursuits of the free States, that the soil there is an uninterrupted barren waste, and that our Northern brethren, having the advantage in nothing except wealth, population, inland and foreign commerce, manufactures, mechanism, inventions, literature, the arts and sciences, and their concomitant branches of profitable industry, miserable objects of charity-are dependent on us for the necessaries of life.

Next to Virginia, Maryland is the greatest Southern hay-producing State; and yet, it is the opinion of several of the most extensive hay and grain dealers in Baltimore, with whom we have conversed on the subject, that the domestic crop is scarcely equal to one-third the demand, and that the balance required for home consumption, about two-thirds, is chiefly brought from New-York, Pennsylva nia and Massachusetts. At this rate, Maryland receives and consumes not less than three hundred and fifteen thousand tons of Northern hay every year; and this, as we are informed by the dealers above-mentioned, at an average cost to the last purchaser, by the time it is stowed in the mow, of at least twenty-five dollars per ton; it would thus appear that this most popular and valuable provender, one of the staple commodities of the North, commands a market in a single slave State, to the amount

of seven million eight hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars per annum.

In this same State of Maryland, less than one million of dollar's worth of cotton finds a market, the whole number of bales sold here in 1850 amounting to only twenty-three thousand three hundred and twenty-five, valued at seven hundred and forty-six thousand four hundred dollars. Briefly, then, and in round numbers, we may state the case thus: Maryland buys annually seven millions of dollars. worth of hay from the North, and one million of dollars worth of cotton from the South. Let slaveholders and their fawning defenders read, ponder and compare.

The exact quantities of Northern hay, rye, and buckwheat flour, Irish potatoes, fruits, clover and grass seeds, and other products of the soil, received and consumed in all the slaveholding States, we have no means of ascertaining; but for all practical purposes, we can arrive sufficiently near to the amount by inference from the above data, and from what we see with our eyes and hear with our cars wherever we go. Food from the North for man or for beast, or for both, is for sale in every market in the South. Even in the most insignificant little villages in the interior of the slave States, where books, newspapers and other mediums of intelligence are unknown, where the poor whites and the negroes are alike bowed down in heathenish ignorance and barbarism, and where the news is received but once a week, and then only in a Northernbuilt stage-coach, drawn by horses in Northern harness, in charge of a driver dressed cap-a-pie in Northern habiliments, and with a Northern whip in his hand,-the agri

cultural products of the North, either crude, prepared, pickled or preserved, are ever to be found.

Mortifying as the acknowledgment of the fact is to us, it is our unbiased opinion-an opinion which will, we be lieve, be endorsed by every intelligent person who goes into a careful examination and comparison of all the facts in the case that the profits arising to the North from the sale of provender and provisions to the South, are far greater than those arising to the South from the sale of cotton, tobacco and breadstuffs to the North. It follows, then, that the agricultural interests of the North being not only equal but actually superior to those of the South, the hundreds of millions of dollars which the commerce and manufactures of the former annually yield, is just so much clear and independent gain over the latter. It fol lows, also, from a corresponding train or system of deduction, and with all the foregoing facts in view, that the dif ference between freedom and slavery is simply the dif ference between sense and nonsense, wisdom and folly, good and evil, right and wrong.

Any observant American, from whatever point of the compass he may hail, who will take the trouble to pass through the Southern markets, both great and small, as we have done, and inquire where this article, that and the other came from, will be utterly astonished at the va riety and quantity of Northern agricultural productions kept for sale. And this state of things is growing worse and worse every year. Exclusively agricultural as the South is in her industrial pursuits, she is barely able to support her sparse and degenerate population. Her men

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and her domestic animals, both dwarfed into shabby objects of commiseration under the blighting effects of slavery, are constantly feeding on the mu..ifarious products of Northern soil. And if the whole truth must be told, we may here add, that these products, like all other articles of merchandize purchased at the North, are generally bought on a credit, and, in a great number of instances, by far too many, never paid for-not, as a general rule, because the purchasers are dishonest or unwilling to pay, but because they are impoverished and depressed by the retrogressive and deadening operations of slavery, that most unprofitable and pernicious institution under which they live.X

FREE AND THE SLAVE STATES.

To show how well we are sustained in our remarks upon hay and other special products of the soil, as well as to give circulation to other facts of equal significance, we quote a single passage from an address by Paul C. Cameron, before the Agricultural Society of Orange County, North Carolina. This production is, in the main, so powerfully conceived, so correct and plausible in its statements and conclusions, and so well calculated, though, perhaps, not intended, to arouse the old North State to a sense of her natural greatness and acquired shame, that we could wish to see it published in pamphlet form, and circulated throughout the length and breadth of that unfortunate and degraded heritage of slavery. Mr. Cameron says:

"I know not when I have been more humiliated, as a North Carolina farmer, than when, a few weeks ago, at a railroad depot at the very doors of our State capital, I saw 3

wagons drawn by Kentucky mules, loading with Northern hay, for the supply not only of the town, but to be taken to the country. Such a sight at the capital of a State whose population is almost exclusively devoted to agriculture, is a most humiliating exhibition. Let us cease to use every thing, as far as it is practicable, that is not the product of our own soil and workshops-not an axe, or a broom, or bucket, from Connecticut. By every consider ation of self-preservation, we are called to make better efforts to expel the Northern grocer from the State with his butter, and the Ohio and Kentucky horse, mule, and hog driver, from our county at least. It is a reproach on us as farmers, and no little deduction from our wealth, that we suffer the population of our towns and villages to supply themselves with butter from another Orange County in New-York."

We have promised to prove that the hay crop of the free states is worth considerably more than all the cotton, tobacco, rice, hay and hemp produced in the fifteen slave States. The compilers of the last census, as we learn from Prof. De Bow, the able and courteous superintendent, in making up the hay-tables, allowed two thousand two hundred and forty pounds to the ton. The price per ton at which we should estimate its value has puzzled us to some extent. Dealers in the article in Baltimore think it will average twenty-five dollars, in their market. Four or five months ago they sold it at thirty dollars per ton. At the very time we write, though there is less activity in the article than usual, we learn, from an examination of sundry prices-current and commercial journals, that hay is selling