three dollars per
acre. A short time since, while on a visit to and in conversation with
one of the most distinguished men of Virginia, who owns and resides on a
plantation on the James River, a few miles above Richmond--observing the
neatness of every thing around, the superiority of his land and the
largeness of his wheat and corn crops, I inquired about his tobacco. "I
never cultivate tobacco," said he, "I detest it, for it has been the
ruin of the state." This is the testimony of one of Virginia's most
prominent and most enlightened sons, a graduate of William and Mary
College, and the friend of Bishop Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and most of
Virginia's other distinguished men, living in his day--one who, in age,
has passed the threescore and ten allotted to mankind, and whose
dignified yet gentle bearing tells that he is one of the survivors of a
class now nearly extinct, "the Virginia gentleman of the old school."

Pass through almost any part of Eastern Virginia, and wherever you go
will be found immense tracts of land, barren and useless, which were
once rich and productive, but which have been exhausted in the
cultivation of tobacco. And yet--notwithstanding this, and strange as it
may appear--there are still to be found among the people of lower
Virginia men who deny that the raising of this crop impoverishes the
soil, and who on the contrary insist that the culture of tobacco
enriches it. They are ready to acknowledge that the land has been
exhausted, but contend that it is owing to the cultivation of corn, and
not of tobacco. This, it need hardly be said, is maintained only by
those who are engaged in raising tobacco. Facts however are stubborn
things, and it may be well to present, just at this time, one or two in
point.

Virginia, when first settled, possessed a soil far superior to that of
any of the Eastern or Middle States. Little or no tobacco has ever been
raised in those states, while corn has been one of the chief products.
In Virginia, where tobacco has been the principal crop, the land has
deteriorated, the rich soil has been exhausted, and become more sterile
than were the bleak hills of New England when the Pilgrim reached her
shores; while in New England, where corn has been produced in abundance,
and but very little tobacco, the soil has been improved until it has
become almost or quite as rich as that of Virginia was at any time
since its settlement. In this day the most unproductive of the N