The same general observations will apply to our slaveholding sections in Maryland, and to many parts of eastern Virginia too, if it were necessary to pursue the investigation there. Emigration to the west has kept pace with the impoverishment of our lands. Large tracts have come into the hands of a few proprietors--too large to be improved, and too much exhausted to be productive. But this is not the worst. The traveller, as he journeys through these districts, smitten with premature barrenness as with a curse, beholds fields, once enclosed and subject to tillage, now abandoned and waste, and covered with straggling pines or scrubby thickets, which are fast overgrowing the waning vestiges of former cultivation. From swamps and undrained morasses, malaria exhales, and like a pestilence infects the country. The inhabitants become a sallow race; the current of life stagnates; energy fails; the spirits droop. Over the whole region a melancholy aspect broods. There are every where signs of dilapidation, from the mansion of the planter with its windows half-glazed, its doors half-hinged, its lawn trampled by domestic animals that have ingress and egress through the broken enclosures, to the ragged roadside house where thriftless poverty finds its abode. No neat cottages with gardens and flowers giving life to the landscape; no beautiful villages where cultivated taste blends with rustic simplicity, enriching and beautifying; no flourishing towns, alive with the bustle of industry--none of those are seen; no, nor any diversified succession of well cultivated farms with their substantial homesteads and capacious barns; no well-constructed bridges, no well-conditioned roads. Neglect, the harbinger of decay, has stamped her impress every where. Slavery, bringing with it from its African home its characteristic accompaniments, seems to have breathed over its resting places here the same desolating breath which made Sahara a desert. No one who has passed from a region of free labor to a slaveholding district can have failed to notice the contrast presented by the change. I have been here speaking of those portions of the country where slavery has existed for a long time, and where it has formed the prominent feature. In some sections the natural fertility of the soil withstands for many years the deteriorating influence of slave culture; in other quarters, the number of slaves being small, the effects of slavery do not become prominently characteristic.