Why is this so? Why should Virginia import potatoes and hay, cheese and butter? An acre of potatoes may be made to yield four hundred bushels, and meadows yield hay by tons, and yet her people raise wheat, of which they obtain six or seven bushels to the acre, and corn, of which they obtain fifteen or twenty, and with the produce of these they buy butter and cheese, pork and potatoes, which yield to the producer five dollars where they get one--and import many of these things too, from States in which manufacturing populations abound, and in which all these commodities should, in the natural course of things, be higher in price than in Virginia, where all, even when employed, are engaged in the cultivation of the soil. The answer to these questions is to be found in the fact that the farmers and planters of the State can make no manure. They raise wheat and corn, which they send elsewhere to be consumed; and the people among whom it is consumed put the refuse on their own lands, and thus are enabled to raise crops that count by tons, which they then exchange with the producers of the wheat produced on land that yields six bushels to the acre. "How many of our people," continues the speaker, "do we see disposing of their lands at ruinous prices, and relinquishing their birthplaces and friends, to settle themselves in the West; and many not so much from choice as from actual inability to support their families and rear and educate their children out of the produce of their exhausted lands--once fertile, but rendered barren and unproductive by a ruinous system of cultivation. "And how greatly is this distress heightened, in witnessing, as we often do, the successions and reverses of this struggle between going and staying, on the part of many emigrants. And how many are there, who after removing, remain only a few years and then return to seize again upon a portion of their native land, and die where they were born. How strangely does it remind us of the poor shipwrecked mariner, who, touching in the midst of the storm the shore, lays hold of it, but is borne seaward by the receding wave; but struggling back, torn and lacerate, he grasps again the rock, with bleeding hands, and still clings to it, as a last and forlorn hope. Nor is this to be wondered at. Perhaps it was the home of his childhood--the habitation of his fathers for past generations--the soil upon which had been expended the savings and nourishment, the energies and virtues of a long life--'the sweat of the living, and the ashes of the dead.' "Oh! how hard to break such ties as these.