We shall take no undue advantage of slavery. It shall have a fair trial, and be judged according to its deserts. Already has it been weighed in the balance, and found wanting; it has been measured in the half-bushel, and found wanting; it has been apprized in the field, and found wanting. Whatever redeeming traits or qualities it may possess, if any, shall be brought to light by subjecting it to other tests.

It was our desire and intention to furnish a correct table of the gallon-measure products of the several States of the Union; but we have not been successful in our attempt to procure the necessary statistics. Enough is known, however, to satisfy us that the value of the milk, wine, ardent spirits, malt liquors, fluids, oils, and molasses, annually produced and sold in the free States, is at least fifty millions of dollars greater than the value of the same articles annually produced and sold in the slave States. Of sweet milk alone, it is estimated that the monthly sales in three Northern cities, New York, Philadelphia and Boston, amount to a larger sum than the marketable value of all the rosin, tar, pitch, and turpentine, annually produced in the Southern States.

Our efforts to obtain reliable information respecting another very important branch of profitable industry, the lumber business, have also proved unavailing; and we are left to conjecture as to the amount of revenue annually derived from it in the two grand divisions of our country. The person whose curiosity prompts him to take an account of the immense piles of Northern lumber now lying on the wharves and houseless lots in Baltimore, Richmond, and other slaveholding cities, will not, we imagine, form a very flattering opinion of the products of Southern forests. Let it be remembered that nearly all the clippers, steamers, and small craft, are built at the North; that large cargoes of Eastern lumber are exported to foreign countries; that nine-tenths of the wooden-ware used in the Southern States is manufactured in New England; that, in outrageous disregard of the natural rights and claims of Southern mechanics, the markets of the South are forever filled with Northern furniture, vehicles, ax helves, walking canes, yard-sticks, clothes-pins and pen-holders; that the extraordinary number of factories, steam-engines, forges and machine-shops in the free States, require an extraordinary quantity of cord-wood; that a large majority of the magnificent edifices and other structures, both private and public, in which timber, in its various forms, is extensively used, are to be found in the free States—we say, let all these things be remembered, and the truth will at once flash across the mind that the forests of the North are a source of far greater income than those of the South. The difference is simply this: At the North everything is turned to advantage. When a tree is cut down, the main body is sold or used for lumber, railing or paling, the stump for matches and shoepegs, the knees for ship-building, and the branches for fuel. At the South everything is either neglected or mismanaged. Whole forests are felled by the ruthless hand of slavery, the trees are cut into logs, rolled into heaps, covered with the limbs and brush, and then burned on the identical soil that gave them birth. The land itself next falls a prey to the fell destroyer, and that which was once a beautiful, fertile and luxuriant woodland, is soon despoiled of all its treasures, and converted into an eye-offending desert.

Were we to go beneath the soil and collect all the mineral and lapidarious wealth of the free States, we should find it so much greater than the corresponding wealth of the slave States, that no ordinary combination of figures would suffice to express the difference. To say nothing of the gold and quicksilver of California, the iron and coal of Pennsylvania, the copper of Michigan, the lead of Illinois, or the salt of New-York, the marble and freestone quarries of New England are, incredible as it may seem to those unacquainted with the facts, far more important sources of revenue than all the subterranean deposits in the slave States. From the most reliable statistics within our reach, we are led to the inference that the total value of all the precious metals, rocks, minerals, and medicinal waters, annually extracted from the bowels of the free States, is not less than eighty-five million of dollars; the whole value of the same substances annually brought up from beneath the surface of the slave States does not exceed twelve millions. In this respect to what is our poverty ascribable? To the same cause that has impoverished and dishonored us in all other respects—the thriftless and degrading institution of slavery.

Nature has been kind to us in all things. The strata and substrata of the South are profusely enriched with gold and silver, and precious stones, and from the natural orifices and aqueducts in Virginia and North Carolina, flow the purest healing waters in the world. But of what avail is all this latent wealth? Of what avail will it ever be, so long as slavery is permitted to play the dog in the manger? To these queries there can be but one reply. Slavery must be suppressed; the South, so great and so glorious by nature, must be reclaimed from her infamy and degradation; our cities, fields and forests, must be kept intact from the unsparing monster; the various and ample resources of our vast domain, subterraneous as well as superficial, must be developed, and made to contribute to our pleasures and to the necessities of the world.

A very significant chapter, and one particularly pertinent to many of the preceding pages, might be written on the Decline of Agriculture in the Slave States; but as the press of other subjects admonishes us to be concise upon this point, we shall present only a few of the more striking instances. In the first place, let us compare the crops of wheat and rye in Kentucky, in 1850, with the corresponding crops in the same State in 1840—after which, we will apply a similar rule of comparison to two or three other slaveholding states.

KENTUCKY.

Wheat, bus. Rye, bus.
Crop of1840 4,803,152 1,321,373
""1850 2,142,822 415,073
Decrease2,660,330bus. Decrease906,300bus.

TENNESSEE.

Wheat, bus. Tobacco, lbs.
Crop of1840 4,569,692 29,550,432
""1850 1,619,386 20,148,932
Decrease2,950,306bus. Decrease9,401,500lbs.