This can be attributed only to slavery, which paralyzes our energies, disperses our population, and keeps us few and poor, in spite of the bountiful gifts of nature with which a benign Providence has endowed our country.

No state has greater conveniences for ship navigation and ship building than Virginia.

We glory in Wheeling, because she only, in Virginia, deserves to be called a manufacturing town.

For this her citizens deserve to be crowned,--not with laurel,--but with the solid gold of prosperity.

Answer: They breathe the atmosphere of free states, almost touching them on both sides.

But again; seeing that Wheeling, as a seat for manufactures, is equal to Pittsburg, and inferior to no town in America, except Richmond; and that, moreover, she has almost no slaves; why is Wheeling so far behind Pittsburg, and…

We shall explain, by examples, how a few slaves in a country may do its citizens more immediate injury than a large number.

When a white family own fifty or one hundred slaves, they can, so long as their land produces well, afford to be indolent and expensive in their habits; for though each yields only a small profit, yet each member of the family has ten or…

It is not until the fields grow old, and the crops grow short, and the negroes and the overseer take nearly all, that the day of ruin can be no longer postponed.

But the ruin of small slaveholders is often accomplished in a single lifetime.

When a white family own five or ten slaves, they cannot afford to be indolent and expensive in their habits; for one black drudge cannot support one white gentleman or lady.

Such unthrifty sentiments are the natural consequence of introducing slaves among the families of a country, especially negro slaves.

They infallibly grow and spread, creating among the white families a distaste for all servile labor, and a desire to procure slaves who may take all drudgery off their hands.

Thus general industry gives way by degrees to indolent relaxation, false notions of dignity and refinement, and a taste for fashionable luxuries.

The result is, that many families are compelled by their embarrassments to sell off and leave the country.

Many who are unable to buy slaves leave it also, because they feel degraded, and cannot prosper, where slavery exists.

The price of cotton has regulated the price of negroes in Virginia; and so it must continue to do; because slave labor is unprofitable here, and nothing keeps up the price of slaves but their value as a marketable commodity in the south.

The fact is, that our eastern brethren must send off, on any terms, the increase of their slaves, because their impoverished country cannot sustain even its present stock of negroes.

But behold in the east the doleful consequences of letting slavery grow up to an oppressive and heart-sickening burden upon a community!

The head spring in East Virginia cannot contain itself; it must find vent; it will shed its black streams through every gap of the Blue Ridge and pour over the Alleghany, till it is checked by abolitionism on the borders.

In plain terms, fellow-citizens, eastern slaveholders will come with their multitudes of slaves to settle upon the fresh lands of West Virginia.

We have shown how slavery has prepared the people for this; how a little slavery makes way for more, and how the law of slave increase operates to fill up every part of the country to the same level with slaves.

Whether you obtain it or not, East Virginia will have triumphed; or, rather, slavery will have triumphed, and all Virginia will have become a land of darkness and of the shadow of death.

Delay, not, then, we beseech you, to raise a barrier against this Stygian inundation, to stand at the Blue Ridge, and with sovereign energy say to this Black Sea of misery, “Hitherto shalt thou come, and no farther.

So far from facilitating the increase of individual or national wealth, slavery retards both.