"This is no gloomy picture of the imagination; but a faithful representation of what most of us know and feel to be true. Who is it that has not had some acquaintance or neighbour--some friend, perhaps some relative, forced into this current of emigration, and obliged from necessity, in the evening, probably, of a long life, to abandon his State and friends, and the home of his fathers and childhood, to seek a precarious subsistence in the supposed El Dorados of the West?" This is a terrible picture, and yet it is but the index to one still worse that must follow in its train. Well does the hon. speaker say that-- "There is another evil attending this continual drain of our population to the West, next in importance to the actual loss of the population itself, and that is, its tendency to continue and enlarge our wretched system of cultivation. "The moment some persons feel assured that for present gain they can exhaust the fertility of their lands in the old States, and then abandon them for those in the West, which, being rich, require neither the aid of science nor art, the natural tendency is at once to give over all efforts at improvement themselves, and kill their land as quickly as possible--then sell it for what it will bring or abandon it as a waste. And such will be found to be the case with too many of the emigrants from the lowlands of Virginia." Another distinguished Virginian, Mr. Ruffin, in urging an effort to restore the lands that have been exhausted, and to bring into activity the rich ones that have never been drained, estimates the advantages to be derived by Lower Virginia alone at $500,000,000. "The strength, physical, intellectual, and moral, as well as the revenue of the commonwealth, will," he says, "Soon derive new and great increase from the growing improvements of that one and the smallest of the great divisions of her territory, which was the poorest by natural constitution--still more, the poorest by long exhausting tillage--its best population gone or going away, and the remaining portion sinking into apathy and degradation, and having no hope left except that which was almost universally entertained of fleeing from the ruined country and renewing the like work of destruction on the fertile lands of the far West."