"Look at South Carolina now, with her houses deserted and falling to decay; her once fruitful fields worn out and abandoned for want of timely improvement or skilful cultivation; and her thousands of acres of inexhaustible lands, still promising an abundant harvest to the _industrious_ husbandman, lying idle and neglected. In the interior of the State where I was born, and where I now live, although a country possessing all the advantages of soil, climate and health, abounding in arable land, unreclaimed from the first rude state of nature, there can now be found many neighborhoods where the population is too sparse to support a common elementary school for children. Such is the deplorable condition of one of the oldest members of this Union, that dates back its settlement more than a century and a half, while other States, born as it were but yesterday, already surpass what Carolina is or ever has been, in the happiest and proudest day of her prosperity." This gentleman chose to attribute the decline of South Carolina to the tariff; rather than to the obvious cause, that one-half of the PEOPLE of South Carolina are poor, ignorant, degraded SLAVES, and the other half suffering in all their faculties and energies, from a moral pestilence which they insanely regard as a blessing and not a curse. Surely it is not owing to the tariff, that this ancient member of the Union has 20,615 white citizens over twenty years of age who do not know their letters; while Maine, with double her population, has only 3,241. Now look upon a very different picture. Mr. Preston, of South Carolina, not long since delivered a speech at Columbia in reference to a proposed rail-road. In this speech, in order to stimulate the efforts of the friends of the road, he indulged in the following strain: