Virginia presents other facts demonstrating the economy and efficiency of slave labour. The great Valley of Virginia (between the Blue Ridge and North Mountain Ranges,) is a farming and grazing region, of fertile soil and prosperous agriculture. In its great extent, some counties are occupied almost exclusively by free labour, and some have a large slave population. Now it is perfectly well known to all intelligent persons here, that precisely in those counties of this beautiful valley where there are most slaves, is the land highest in price, the agriculture most profitable and skillful, the farm buildings most elegant, and the community most prosperous and wealthy. Virginia east of the Blue Ridge is partly a farming and partly a planting region, having a mixed agriculture. Its soil is exceedingly different from that of the great valley, even where as fertile; and consequently the tillage is unlike. But there too, the neatest, most thorough and most profitable agriculture, and the highest priced lands, the finest farm stock, and the most prosperous landholders, are to be found precisely where the slave labour is most prevalent. And there is no agriculture in America superior to that of these favoured regions. But, in conclusion, even if the industrial pursuits of the South were in the unfavourable condition which the Yankees love to assert, the sufficient cause would be found, not in slavery, but in the exactions and swindlings of their own section, through sectional federal legislation. Let a sober statement of these exactions be weighed, and the wonder will be, not that the South should be depleted, but that she is not bled to death. In the first place, the Federal Government, at its foundation, adopted the policy of giving a fishing bounty, (to encourage, as it said, a school of sailors for the national marine,) which went wholly into the pockets of New Englanders. It is said that the bounties paid are yearly about one and a half millions. Supposing that half only of the sum thus taken from the Federal Treasury was paid in by the South, (which we shall see is less than the truth,) this bounty, with that part of its increase which has accrued by simple interest alone, amounts now to one hundred and seventy-one millions, transferred by this unfair legislation from the South to the North. Next are to be mentioned the tonnage duties on foreign ships carrying between American ports, which, as the South had few ships, constituted a perpetual tax on us for the benefit of the North. Its amount cannot possibly be estimated with exactness, but it must have amounted to millions annually. Next came the oppression of a protective tariff, raising upon imports as high a revenue as sixty or seventy millions annually, in the last years of the government. As the South had few manufactures, and the North many, and as these duties, even where laid for revenue, were discriminating against the cheaper