that of 'true Britons and true churchmen;' the former was a more cherished distinction there than elsewhere in America. In 1837 was copied from a tombstone in an old-settled part of the State, this inscription: 'Here lyes the body of Lieut. William Harris, who died May ye 16, 1608--a good soldier, husband, and neighbor: _by birth a Briton_.' In these facts of the past and normal tendencies we find ample means and motives to account for the anomalous political elements involved in the history--social and civic--of Virginia. While boasting the oldest university where four Presidents of the United States were educated, she sustained a slave code which was a bitter satire on civilized society: the law of entail long prevailed in a community ostensibly democratic, and only by the strenuous labors of Jefferson was church monopoly abolished. It is not surprising, in the retrospect, that her roll of famous citizens includes the noblest and the basest names which illustrate the political transitions of the land; the architects and subverters of free polity, the magnanimous and the perfidious. When the ameliorating influence of time and truth had, in a degree, harmonized the incongruous elements of opinion and developed the economical resources, while they liberalized the sentiments and habitudes of the people; when, says Caines, 'slavery, by exhausting the soil, had eaten away its own profits, and the recolonization by free settlers had actually begun, came suddenly the prohibition of the African slave trade, and nearly at the same time, the vast enlargement of the field for slavery, by the purchase of Louisiana; and these two events made Virginia again profitable as a means of breeding for exportation and sale at the South. The future geographer who elaborately applies the philosophy of that science, as interpreted by its modern professors, to our own history, will find in the events of the last few years in Virginia the richest and most impressive illustrations of local and physical causes in determining political and social destinies. Between the eastern and western portion of that State it will be demonstrated that nature placed irreconcilable barriers to the supremacy of slave labor and slave property; and the economical value of each will be shown thus and there tested with emphatic truth; so that by the laws of physical geography the first effect of an appeal to arms to maintain the one, was to alienate, as a civic element, the other, and give birth to a new State, by virtue of the self assertion incident to the violation of a normal instinct and necessity of civilization.