and the remainder,
$195,430,000, is the sum by which the unoccupied lands of Virginia,
converted into farms, would have been increased in value by
emancipation. Add this to the enhanced value of their present farms,
$815,845,925, and the result would be $1,011,275,925, as the gain of
Virginia in the value of lands by emancipation. To these we should add,
from the same cause, the enhancement of the town and city property in
Virginia to the extent of several hundred millions of dollars. In order
to realize the truth, we must behold Virginia as she would have been,
with New York railroads and canals, farms, manufactures, commerce,
towns, and cities. Then we must consider the superior natural advantages
of Virginia, her far greater area, her richer soil, her more genial sun,
her greater variety of products, her mines of coal, iron, gold, copper,
and lead, her petroleum, her superior hydraulic power, her much larger
coast line, with more numerous and deeper harbors--and reflect what
Virginia would have been in the absence of slavery. Her early statesmen,
Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Mason, Tucker, and Marshall, all
realized this great truth, and all desired to promote emancipation in
Virginia. But their advice was disregarded by her present leaders--the
new, false, and fatal dogmas of Calhoun were substituted; and, as a
consequence, Virginia, from the first rank (_longo intervallo_) of all
the States, has fallen to the fifth, and, with slavery continued, will
descend still more rapidly in the future than in the past. Let her
abolish slavery, and she will commence a new career of progress. Freedom
and its associates, education and energy, will occupy her waste lands,
restore her exhausted fields, decaying cities, and prostrate industry,
employ her vast hydraulic power, develop her mines, unite by her grand
canals the waters of the Chesapeake and Ohio, and, placing her feet upon
slavery, hear her proclaim, in the proud language of her own State
motto, '_Sic semper tyrannis._'

By census table 36, p. 197, the value, in 1860, of the farm lands of all
the Slave States, was $2,570,466,935, and the number of acres
245,721,062, worth $10.46 per acre. In the Free States, the value of the
farm lands was $4,067,947,286, and the number of acres 161,462,008,
worth $25.19 per acre. Now if, as certainly in the absence of slavery
would have been the case, the farm lands of the South had been worth as
much per acre as those of th