Look into the Patent Office reports, and see in what sections of country mechanical improvements and the application of science to the useful arts have originated. Out of _five hundred and seventy-two_ patents issued in 1847, only _sixty-six_ went to the slave states. The patents annually issued, it is true, are a mingled heap of chaff and wheat, but some of it is wheat worthy of Olympus. I think the Patent Office reports show that at least six or eight times as many patents have been taken out for the north as for the south. What improvements will a slave ever make in agricultural implements; in the manufacture of metals; in preparing wool, cotton, silk, fur, or paper; in chemical processes; in the application of steam; in philosophical, nautical, or optical instruments; in civil engineering, architecture, the construction of roads, canals, wharves, bridges, docks, piers, &c.; in hydraulics or pneumatics; in the application of the mechanical powers; in household furniture, or wearing apparel; in printing, binding, engraving, &c., &c.? This question, when put in reference to slaves, appears ridiculous; and yet it is no more absurd, when asked in reference to an ignorant slave, than when asked in reference to an uneducated white man. The fact that the latter is a voter makes no difference, notwithstanding the common opinion, in certain latitudes, that it does. All such improvements come from minds which have had an early awakening, and been put on scientific trains of thought in their childhood and youth,--a thing utterly impossible for the people at large, without Common Schools. These are causes; now look at effects. In the New England states, the iron manufacture is twenty times as much, according to the population, as it is in Virginia; and yet Virginia has far more of the ore than they. In cotton, we can hardly find a fraction low enough to express the difference. The ship-building in Maine and Massachusetts is thirty-five times as much as in Virginia. The north comes to the south, cuts their timber, carries it home, manufactures it, and then brings it back, wrought into a hundred different forms, to be sold to those who would see it rot before their eyes. Can any man give a reason why Norfolk should not have grown like New York, other than the difference in the institutions of the people? Jamestown was settled before Plymouth, and had _natural_ advantages superior to it. Plymouth now has a population of between seven and eight thousand, is worth two millions of dollars, and taxed itself last year, for schools and schoolhouses, more than seven thousand dollars. I ought rather to say, that it invested more than seven thousand dollars in a kind of stock that yields a hundred per cent. income. How many bats there may be in the ruins of Jamestown, the last census does not inform us.