NOTICE.

THE decided approbation with which this remarkable speech has been welcomed, not only by citizens of every party in the Free States, but by intelligent and candid men in the Slave States, has induced the subscriber to print this revised and improved edition, in better style, and in larger type, than any previous edition. The price is fixed at only five dollars a hundred, in the hope that the friends of freedom, and all lovers of our common country, will unite in giving this calm, candid, and unanswerable argument an extensive circulation. A few copies have been printed on fine paper, with covers. Orders are respectfully solicited by the Publisher.

Wм. B. FOWLE.

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. Then debts slyly accumulate. 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. Citizens of the Valley! Is it not so? Is not this the chief reason why your beautiful country does not prosper like the Northern Valleys? We have examined the census of counties for the last thirty or forty years, in Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina, with the view to discover the law of population in the Northern slave States. The following are among the general results.

When a county had at first comparatively few slaves, the slave population, except near the free borders, gained upon the whites, and most rapidly in the older parts of the country.

The population, as a whole, increased so long as the slaves were fewer than the whites, but more slowly as the numbers approached to equality. In our Valley, a smaller proportion of slaves had the effect of a larger one in East Virginia, to retard the increase of population.

When the slaves became as numerous as the whites in the Eastern and older parts of the country, population came to a stand; when they outnumbered the whites, it declined. Consequently, the slave population has tended to diffuse itself equally over the country, rising more rapidly as it was further below the white population, and going down when it had risen above them.

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. Eastern negroes and Western cattle are alike in this, that, if the market abroad go down or be closed, both sorts of animals, the horned and the woollyheaded, become a worthless drug at home. 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. We join not the English and American abolition cry about "slavebreeding," in East Virginia, as if it were a chosen occupation, and therefore a reproachful one. It no such thing, but a case of dire necessity, and many a heartache does it cost the good people there. But, behold in the East the doleful consequences of letting slavery grow up to an oppressive and heart-sickening burden upon a community! Cast it off, West Virginians, whilst yet you have the power; for if you let it descend unbroken to your children, it will have grown to a mountain of misery upon their heads.

Good policy will require the Southern States, ere long, to close their markets against Northern negroes. When the Southern slave market is closed, or when, by the reduced profits of slave labor in the South, it becomes glutted; then the stream of Virginia negroes, heretofore pouring dowr upon the South, will be thrown back upon the State, and like a river dammed up, must spread itself over the whole territory of the commonwealth. 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. But even abolitionism cannot finally stop it. Abolitionism itself will tolerate slavery, when slaveholders grow sick and tired of it.

In plain terms, fellow-citizens, Eastern slaveholders will come with their multitudes of slaves to settle upon the fresh lands of West Virginia. Eastern slaves will be sent by thousands for a market in West Virginia. Every valley will echo with the cry, Negroes! Negroes for sale! Dog cheap! Dog cheap!" And because they are dog cheap, many of our people will buy them. 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.

And then, fellow-citizens, when you have suffered your country to be filled with negro slaves instead of white freemen; when its population shall be as motley as Joseph's coat of many colors; as ring-streaked and speckled as father Jacob's flock was in Padan Aram ;- what will the white basis of representation avail you, if you obtain it? 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.

Then, by a forbearance which has no merit, and a supineness which has no excuse, you will have given to your children, for their inheritance, this lovely land blackened with a negro population, — the offscourings of Eastern Virginia, - the fag-end of slavery, — the loathsome dregs of that cup of abomination, which has already sickened to death the Eastern half of our commonwealth. 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 further."

NOTICE.

THE decided approbation with which this remarkable speech has been welcomed, not only by citizens of every party in the Free States, but by intelligent and candid men in the Slave States, has induced the subscriber to print this revised and improved edition, in better style, and in larger type, than any previous edition. The price is fixed at only five dollars a hundred, in the hope that the friends of freedom, and all lovers of our common country, will unite in giving this calm, candid, and unanswerable argument an extensive circulation. A few copies have been printed on fine paper, with covers. Orders are respectfully solicited by the Publisher.

Wм. B. FOWLE.