"I can scarcely persuade myself that there is a solitary gentleman in this House who will not readily admit that slavery is an evil, and that its removal, if practicable, is a consummation most devoutly to be wished. I have not heard, nor do I expect to hear, a voice raised in this Hall to the contrary." In the language of another, "we might multiply extracts almost indefinitely from Virginia authorities--testifying to the blight and degradation that have overtaken the Old Dominion, in every department of her affairs. Her commerce gone, her agriculture decaying, her land falling in value, her mining and manufactures nothing, her schools dying out,--she presents, according to the testimony of her own sons, the saddest of all pictures--that of a sinking and dying State." Every year leaves her in a worse condition than it found her; and as it is with Virginia, so it is with the entire South. In the terse language of Governor Wise, "all have grown poor together." The black god of slavery, which the South has worshipped for two hundred and thirty-seven years, is but a devil in disguise; and if we would save ourselves from being engulphed in utter ruin we must repudiate this foul god, for a purer deity, and abandon his altars for a holier shrine. No time is to be lost; his fanatical adorers, the despotic adversaries of human liberty, are concocting schemes for the enslavement of all the laboring classes irrespective of race or color. The issue is before us; we cannot evade it; we must meet it with firmness, and with unflinching valor. What it was that paralyzed the tongues of all those members of the Virgina Legislature, who, at the session of 1831-'32, distinguished themselves by advocating a system of emancipation, is a mystery that has never yet been solved. Whether any or all of them shared a division of spoils with a certain newspaper editor, we have no means of knowing; but if all accounts be true, there was consummated in Richmond, in the latter part of the year 1832, one of the blackest schemes of bribery and corruption that was ever perpetrated in this or any other country. We are assured, however, that one thing is certain, and it is this: that the negro population of Virginia was very considerably and suddenly decreased by forcible emigration--that a large gang was driven further South, sold, and the proceeds divided among certain renegades and traitors, who, Judas-like, had agreed to serve the devil for a price.