Some Virginia politicians, proudly,--yes, _proudly_, fellow-citizens,--call our old commonwealth _The Mother of States_! These _enlightened_ patriots might pay her a still higher compliment, by calling her _The Grandmother_ of States. For our part, we are grieved and mortified to think of the lean and haggard condition of our venerable mother. Her black children have sucked her so dry, that now, for a long time past, she has not milk enough for her offspring, either black or white. She has sent,--or we should rather say, she has driven,--from her soil at least one third of all the emigrants who have gone from the old states to the new. More than another third have gone from the other old slave states. Many of these multitudes, who have left the slave states, have shunned the regions of slavery, and settled in the free countries of the west. These were generally industrious and enterprising white men, who found, by sad experience, that a country of slaves was not the country for them. It is a truth, a certain truth, that _slavery drives free laborers,--farmers, mechanics, and all, and some of the best of them too,--out of the country, and fills their places with negroes_. It is admitted on all hands, that slave labor is better adapted to agriculture than to any other branch of industry; and that, if not good for agriculture, it is really good for nothing. Therefore, since in agriculture slave labor is proved to be far less productive than free labor, _slavery is demonstrated to be not only unprofitable, but deeply injurious to the public prosperity_. We do not mean that slave labor can never earn any thing for him that employs it. The question is between free labor and slave labor. He that chooses to employ a sort of labor that yields only half as much to the hand as another sort would yield, makes a choice that is not only unprofitable, but deeply injurious to his interest. Agriculture in the slave states may be characterized in general by two epithets, _extensive_, _exhaustive_,--which in all agricultural countries forebode two things, _impoverishment_, _depopulation_. The general system of slaveholding farmers and planters, in all times and places, has been, and now is, and ever will be, to cultivate much land, badly, for present gain,--in short, to kill the goose that lays the golden egg. They cannot do otherwise with laborers who work by compulsion, for the benefit only of their masters, and whose sole interest in the matter is to do as little and to consume as much as possible. This ruinous system of large farms cultivated by slaves showed its effects in Italy, eighteen hundred years ago, when the Roman empire was at the height of its grandeur.