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FROM THE RICHMOND ENQUIRER
It has been satisfactorily established by a correspondent of this paper, that the profits made by manufacturers, merchants, jobbers, .&c., in the Northern States, upon the goods manufactured in those States and imported and brought through said States, for consumption in Virginia, amount to a sum ranging from four and a half to five millions of dollars annually! An enormous tribute to be paid by a single slave State, to the intermeddling free States of the North. While the figures our correspondent on the subject of taxation and its consequences are satisfactory, without enquiring how this delegated condition of things may be corrected, we should with some confidence, call upon all parties to look to the articles below from abolition prints in New York and Pennsylvania, and expect Whigs as well as Democrats, to prepare their minds for coming events. What will be the condition of the South, if the underground railroad party should triumph in the next Presidential election? In vain may we plead the obligations of the Compromise when the government of the country shall be in the bonds of the underground stock jobbers. When they now violate the law with impunity, and advertise increasing movements against the South, will they not abolish all law and constitutional obligations? Can any sane man doubt the extremities to which these fanatics will go?
And yet, what better can we expect? We have thrown into their hands the whole of the great resources of the finest country upon which the sun ever shone. Our people have sacrificed the commerce of the State, by a blind and shameful submission to every thing Northern. They will purchase nothing from the merchants of the country unless it be stamped with this mystical Northern virtue! The goods of our honest manufacturers cannot be sold until after they are sent to the slave stealers, and a profit made by selling them back to our merchants with the mystical Northern stamps upon them. Goods imported from Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, or the West Indies, cannot be sold unless they come through Northern hands. If we ever expect to place ourselves upon an equality with the Northern States in procuring goods at low prices, and in making sale of our own productions at fair prices, we must place the manufacturer and the agriculturist side by side, as they are in the Northern States. To effect this object, we must restore our foreign trade, support our own manufacturers, and diminish, the purchases of Northern goods as rapidly as possible.
By this course we shall strengthen our own State and people, and weaken those of the North. The time has now come when the security of the Southern States must be estimated in proportion to their physical and moral power. When the constitution and laws of the United States are no longer available for our protection, what can we look to? Is it not clear that we must look to the physical power of our own people? And what is that power worth when we have voluntarily given up our trade with foreign nations manufacture almost nothing at home, and have thrown ourselves, soul and body, masters and slaves, into the hands of a fanatical league, and depend upon them for the clothing of our own families, and of the very negroes they steal? In this miserable, dependent condition, without unity, energy or sagacity to right ourselves, what hope lies before us? The State divided in politics all over, torn in sectional feuds on local questions, without unity upon any great system of policy for our common protection, it is enough to sicken every heart at the prospect before us! The safety of our people and property has been sunk into the insignificance of an idle dream of the last moon; and gentlemen, heretofore hearing the impress of statesmen, have assumed the attitude of drill sergeants to petty factions, seeking local advantages for the purpose of embittering still more, the dirty pool of sectional strife, and of poisoning the remaining ligaments of social strength, which are not already gangrenous. Where, then, is our moral influence.
Why should each section of the State be embittered against every other, upon the subject of taxation, and like the battle of the Lion and the Tiger, end in the defeat of both combatants, leaving the carcasses to be carried off by the crafty fox? Thus, while the disputes before the Legislature, to render taxes unequal upon particular sections or interests are of the most acrimonious character, and must end in permanent disaffection among the people, not one finger has been raised to resist or obstruct the enormous, unjust and wholesale taxation levied by Northern manufacturers and merchants upon us, (amounting to some five millions annually,) nor to resist the constant system of slave-stealing, mentioned by the Tribune.
From the Pennsylvania Freeman of April 22.
THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD.-The New York merchants have complained, with some bitterness, that business this spring has been extremely dull-that the South, especially, has been very backward both in respect to payments and purchases. The following paragraph from the "Tribune" of Monday, shows that this dullness of trade has not diminished the business of the most important line of travel which passes through the great commercial metropolis:
"Revival of Business.-The directors of the Underground Railroad report to us the passage, through our city, last Monday, of forty-one human chattels, from the land of the slave-whip, and cofline, on a pilgrimage to the North Star. They are now all safely landed in Canada, where they have ceased to be stray cattle, and become men, women and children, no more to be subjects of the auction block and brand. The directors report the railroad in excellent order, and doing a safe and increasing business."
The Richmond Republican of Monday, after quoting the above article from the Tribune, remarks:
Can any one wonder, when such wholesale plunder of the South is of common occurrence, and when it is so shamefully boasted of by a leading Northern Journal, that the South exhibits some uneasiness, and that it squirms a little when it is undergoing such a skinning? or, are we to be astonished when this same N.Y. Tribune urges Southern Whigs to run Gen. Scott, and hold their tongues about the Fugitive Slave Law, that Southern Whigs should become a little suspicious, and refuse to commit themselves to such guidance?
As to the negro paradise in Canada, we dare say that the fugitive slaves have discovered that liberty to freeze and starve to death is no great luxury after all. Greeley is particularly solicitous that they shall not stop in his neighborhood.