When men come together and combine their efforts, they are enabled to bring into activity all the vast and various powers of the earth; and the more they come together, the greater is the value of land, the greater the demand, for labour, the higher its price, and the greater the freedom of man. When, on the contrary, they separate from each other, the greater is the tendency to a decline in the value of land, the less is the value of labour, and the less the freedom of man. Such being the case, if we desire to ascertain the ultimate cause of the existence of the domestic slave trade, it would seem to be necessary only to ascertain the cause of the exhaustion of the land. The reason usually assigned for this will be found in the following passage, extracted from one of the English journals of the day;-- "The mode of agriculture usually coincident with the employment of slave labour is essentially exhaustive, and adapted therefore only to the virgin-richness of a newly-colonized soil. The slave can plant, and dig, and hoe: he works rudely and lazily with rude tools: and his unwilling feet tread the same path of enforced labour day after day. But slave labour is not adapted to the operations of scientific agriculture, which restores its richness to a wornout soil; and it is found to be a fact that the planters of the Northern slave States, as, _e.g._, Virginia, gradually desert the old seats of civilization, and advance further and further into the yet untilled country. Tobacco was the great staple of Virginian produce for many years after that beautiful province was colonized by Englishmen. It has exhausted the soil; grain crops have succeeded, and been found hardly less exhaustive; and emigration of both white and coloured population to the West and South has taken place to a very large extent, The result may be told in the words of an American witness:--'That part of Virginia which lies upon tide waters presents an aspect of universal decay. Its population diminishes, and it sinks day by day into a lower depth of exhaustion and poverty. The country between tide waters and the Blue Ridge is fast passing into the same condition. Mount Vernon is a desert waste; Monticello is little better, and the same circumstances which have desolated the lands of Washington and Jefferson have impoverished every planter in the State. Hardly any have escaped, save the owners of the rich bottom lands along James River, the fertility of which it seems difficult utterly to destroy.'[46] Now a Virginia planter stands in much the same relation to his plantation as an absentee Irish landlord to his estate; the care of the land is in each case handed over to a middleman, who is anxious to screw out of it as large a return of produce or rent as possible; and pecuniary embarrassment is in both cases the result. But as long as every pound of cotton grown on the Mississippi and the Red River finds eager customers in Liverpool, the