With the exception of the northern extremity of this mountain group, these mines of natural wealth may be said to have been unexplored. Below the rich and populous State of Pennsylvania, the hum of human industry ceases; for we then pass into the paralyzing shadow of Slavery. This Slavery forbade the development of the earth's treasures, as well as the enlightenment of the minds of the poor and ignorant whites. The forges of Vulcan would have hammered out and broken into fragments the chains of that bondage which not only oppressed the fettered blacks, but debased, with its corroding influence, the competing labor of the white man. The slaveholders concealed this immense natural wealth from the eyes of science from motives of policy; and rather than incur the hazard of revolution, by educating the masses of their own people, they preferred to neglect their natural advantages, and to send to distant and even foreign lands the products of their fields and their system, to be worked up into the marvellous fabrics of human ingenuity and skill. This same State of Virginia, which is the real gateway to the empires of the West, and which is not surpassed in natural physical advantages by any equal extent of territory on the globe, is the most ignorant of all of the States of the republic. Ninety thousand of its native-born free people, over twenty years of age, before the war could not read nor write; whilst sterile and stormy Maine, with her cold lands and colder skies, contained but two thousand of the same class, out of a population more than half as great. And New England, with a population of almost three times as great as the free people of Virginia, is ashamed by the number of seven thousand illiterate natives past the age of twenty. Who will wonder at the display of barbarity and audacity when the statistics of education and ignorance are exhibited? "Education and liberty," says Mirabeau, "are the bases of all social harmony and all human prosperity." Which can civilization curse the most, London or Amsterdam? the Dutch who introduced Slavery, or the English who thought Virginia a good place to "colonize aristocratic stupidity," and who sent colonists, who were, according to the historian, "fitter to breed a riot than to found a colony." The condition of the present day shows how rigidly the first instructions have been observed and enforced. "Thank God," writes one of its early governors to the English Privy Council, "thank God there are no free schools or printing, and I hope we shall not have any these hundred years! for learning has brought disobedience and heresy and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them and libels against the best government. God keep us from both!" XXXII. And so these mines, and fields, and forests, remain to the present day, unsurveyed, unexplored and unknown, save to a few wanderers of science.