This seems the suitable place to notice the most insulting and preposterous of the abolitionists' slanders. It is that expressed by calling Virginia the "slave-breeding commonwealth." What do these insolent asses mean? Do they intend to revile Virginia, because she did not suppress the natural increase of this peaceful and happy class of her people, by wholesale infanticide? Or because she did not, like the North, subject them to social evils so cruel and murderous, as to kill off that increase by the slow torture of vice, oppression, and destitution? It was the honour of Virginia, that she _was a man-breeding commonwealth_; that her benignant government made existence a blessing, both to the black man and the white, and, consequently, conferred it on many of both. If it has been proved, which we claim, that servitude was the best condition for the blacks, and that it promoted their multiplication, then this is a praise and not a reproach to Virginia. How perverse and absurd is the charge, that Virginia was actuated by a motive beastly and avaricious, in bestowing existence on many black men, and making it a blessing to them; because, forsooth, her wise government of them made them useful to the State and to themselves! By the same reason, the Christian parents who rejoice in children as a gift of the Lord, and a blessing to him "who hath his quiver full of them," are "slave-breeders," because they make their children useful, and hope to find them supports to their old age. But medical statistics have revealed the fact, that another sure test of the physical well-being and progress of a people may be found, in the _per-centage_ of hereditary disease, idiocy, and lunacy among them. The hardships, destitution, and immoralities of a bad state of society have a powerful influence to propagate blindness, deafness, idiocy, scrofula, _cretinism_, and to harass the feebler minds into derangement; while the blessings of good government, abundant food and raiment, and social happiness, strengthen and elevate the "human breed." The returns of the census of 1850 were collected by authority of Congress, on these points, and they show that of whites, North and South, about _one person in every thousand_ is either deaf, dumb, blind, insane, or idiotic. Of free blacks in the North, _one person in every five hundred and six_ was in one or the other of these sad conditions! Of the black people of the South, _one person among every one thousand four hundred and forty-six_, was thus afflicted. So that, by this test, Southern slaves are three times as prosperous, contented, happy, and moral as Northern free blacks, and once and a half times as much so as the whites themselves. The frightful proportion which these elemental maladies have reached among the wretched free blacks of abolitiondom, does more to reveal the misery of their condition there, than volumes of description.