In a late number of an English magazine, Harriet Martineau gives some account of her conversations, when in America in 1835, with Chief-Justice Marshall and Mr. Madison. These men then represented the old ideas of the Republic and of Virginia as it had been. The following extract fully declares their opinions: 'When I knew Chief-Justice Marshall he was eighty-three--as bright-eyed and warm-hearted as ever, while as dignified a judge as ever filled the highest seat in the highest court of any country. He said he had seen Virginia the leading State for half his life; he had seen her become the second, and sink to be (I think) the fifth. 'Worse than this, there was no arresting her decline if her citizens did not put an end to slavery; and he saw no signs of any intention to do so, east of the mountains, at least. He had seen whole groups of estates, populous in his time, lapse into waste. He had seen agriculture exchanged for human stock-breeding; and he keenly felt the degradation. 'The forest was returning over the fine old estates, and the wild creatures which had not been seen for generations were reaeppearing, numbers and wealth were declining, and education and manners were degenerating. It would not have surprised him to be told that on that soil would the main battles be fought when the critical day should come which he foresaw. 'To Mr. Madison despair was not easy. He had a cheerful and sanguine temper, and if there was one thing rather than another which he had learned to consider secure, it was the Constitution which he had so large a share in making. Yet he told me that he was nearly in despair, and that he had been quite so till the Colonization Society arose. 'Rather than admit to himself that the South must be laid waste by a servile war, or the whole country by a civil war, he strove to believe that millions of negroes could be carried to Africa, and so got rid of. I need not speak of the weakness of such a hope. What concerns us now is that he saw and described to me, when I was his guest, the dangers and horrors of the state of society in which he was living. 'He talked more of slavery than of all other subjects together, returning to it morning, noon, and night. He said that the clergy perverted the Bible because it was altogether against slavery; that the colored population was increasing faster than the white; and that the state of morals was such as barely permitted society to exist. 'Of the issue of the conflict, whenever it should occur, there could, he said, be no doubt. A society burdened with a slave system could make no permanent resistance to an unencumbered enemy; and he was astonished at the fanaticism which blinded some Southern men to so clear a certainty.