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 turpi tude 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? be comes 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 known 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

'37, or about that time, the Hon. Abbott Lawrence, of Boston, backed by his brother Amos and other millionaires of New England, went down to Richmond with the sole view of reconnoitering the manufacturing facilities of that place -fully determined, if pleased with the water-power, to erect a large number of cotton-mills and machine-shops. He had been in the capital of Virginia only a day or two before he discovered, much to his gratification, that nature had shaped everything to his liking; and as he was a business man who transacted business in a business-like manner, he lost no time in making preliminary arrangements for the consummation of his noble purpose. His mission was one of peace and promise; others were to share the benefits of his laudable and concerted scheme; thousands of poor boys and girls in Virginia, instead of growing up in extreme poverty and ignorance, or of having to emigrate to the free States of the West, were to have avenues of profitable employment opened to them at home thus they would be enabled to earn an honest and reputa ble living, to establish and sustain free schools, free libraries, free lectures, and free presses, to become useful and exemplary members of society, and to die fit candidates for heaven. The magnanimous New Englander was in ecstasies with the prospect that opened before him. Individually, so far as mere money was concerned, he was perfectly independent; his industry and economy in early life had secured to him the ownership and control of an ample fortune. With the aid of eleven other men, each equal to himself, he could have bought the whole city of Richmo. 1-negroes and all-though it is not to be pre

;

sumed that he would have disgraced his name by becoming a trader in human flesh. But he was not selfish; unlike the arrogant and illiberal slaveholder, he did not regard himself as the centre around whom everybody else should revolve. On the contrary, he was a genuine philanthropist. While, with a shrewdness that will command the admiration of every practical business man, he engaged in nothing that did not swell the dimensions of his own purse, he was yet always solicitous to invest his capital in a manner calculated to promote the interest of those around him. Nor was he satisfied with simply furnishing the means whereby his less fortunate neighbors were to become prosperous, intelligent and contented. With his generous heart and sagacious mind, he delighted to aid them in making a judicious application of his wealth to their own use. Moreover, as a member of society, he felt that the community had some reasonable claims upon him, and he made it obligatory on himself constantly to devise plans and exert his personal efforts for the public good. Such was the character of the distinguished manufacturer who honored Richmond with his presence nineteen or twenty years ago; such was the character of the men whom he represented, and such were the grand designs which they sought to accomplish.

To the enterprising and moneyed descendant of the Pilgrim Fathers it was a matter of no little astonishment, that the immense water-power of Richmond had been so long neglecte 1. He expressed his surprise to a number of Virginians, and was at a loss to know why they had not, long prior to the period of his visit amongst them,