In the course of a single year, 1835-6, no less than forty thousand slaves are said to have been sold out of Virginia alone! ("Niles's Reg." Oct. 8, 1836.) The "New York Journal of Commerce" of Oct. 12, 1835, contained a letter from a Virginian, whom the editor calls "a very good and sensible man," asserting that _twenty thousand_ slaves had been driven to the South from Virginia during that year, of which nearly one fourth was then remaining. But 1835 and 1836 were years of great speculation. In 1837 the consequent severe pressure in the money market was attributed by a committee of the citizens of Mobile (Ala.) in part to over-trading in slaves. Their report states, that purchases by Alabama of that species of property from other States since 1833 have amounted to about ten million dollars annually. The slaves increase in about the same ratio in all of the Slave States. If the warmer latitudes of the extreme South are more congenial to them, and favor their increase more than the climate of Virginia, this effect is, at least, fully balanced by the great amount and unhealthy character of much of the labor on the sugar, rice, and cotton plantations, and by the great extent to which slave-breeding is carried in the more northern States. The following table exhibits the rates of increase of the slaves, every ten years, from 1790 to 1840:-- +-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+ | 1790-1800 | 1800-1810 | 1810-1820 | 1820-1830 | 1830-1840 | +-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+ | 27 | 33 | 29 | 30 | 28 | +-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+ Accordingly, for the fifty years ending in 1840, the slaves increased on an average a little over twenty-eight per cent every ten years. We adopt this as a fair statement of what should be their decennial natural increase in all the States; and, by natural increase, we mean increase from births. The following tables explain themselves:--