It is a notorious fact, well known to every one who has had opportunities of making observations, that in those parts of the United States where the operations of farming have been confided mostly to slaves, the lands are exhausted of their fertility and have become barren and unproductive.  Some lands are now in this condition, which were originally the finest in the United States.  Eastern Virginia is a good sample of the effects of slave labor on the fertility of lands.  This all results from the ignorance, carelessness and inattention of those to whom the operations of farming are confided.  All soils are capable of improvement by judicious culture, and the interests of farmers, individually and collectively, as well as the interest of every American citizen, requires at their hands to so cultivate their lands as to augment their fertility; and not solely with a view to their present productiveness.  It is a duty incumbent on them as good citizens; a duty they owe to themselves; to their posterity; to the nation; to the world.

CHAPTER VI.

There is yet another evil growing out of slavery which I must notice before I bring my remarks to a close on this topic.  I allude to the degraded condition of a portion of the white population in the slave States.  There are, throughout the slave States, a class of the white population who are so debased by ignorance and vice, that the slaves are in many respects their superiors.  They are about on a par with the free negroes.  About the larger cities in the North, a similar class may be found, a majority of whom are free negroes and foreigners.  The poverty, vice, ignorance and degradation of this class of persons, in the South, is a sore evil, and demands the attention of every Christian philanthropist in the Southern States.  This, I conceive, has originated partly from the competition of slave and free labor, but mainly, I presume, from the association of this class with the African population.  There are other agencies, no doubt, which have contributed to debase and brutalize this class of the white population, but I judge, that the causes above indicated, are the principal ones.  Some will, no doubt, attribute this in part to the disparity between the lower classes in the South, and what they choose to term the slaveholding aristocracy.  They will contend, that the vast difference between the higher and lower classes in the South, results in the deterioration of the latter.  There is some plausibility in the argument, and it may be that there is some truth in it, but such individuals have forgotten that the same agency is in active operation in the free as well as the slave States.  I am aware that men of wealth do not feel themselves under any obligation to associate with their less fortunate neighbors, the world over.  It is one of the characteristics of human nature.  But men of wealth in the Southern part of the United States, are not more haughty, distant