comfortable and independent; a condition, however, by no means to be despised, especially when capable of suggesting such poetical ideas as the following: "Tis I can delve and plough, love, The present is a most favourable season for investing money in this country; and a judicious capitalist, who would take time to look about him, and watch opportunities, might lay out his money to great advantage. The depreciation of real estate throughout the Union is perfectly astonishing, and sales are occasionally forced at sacrifices almost incredible. You will have seen in the American newspapers, the various plans before Congress, and the recommendation in the Report of the Secretary of the Treasury, for remitting part of the price, and extending the time of payment to those purchasers of the public lands whose instalments are not yet paid up. This proposed relief will probably prevent the Alabama settlers from executing the intentions, which in my letters from thence I mentioned having been so generally expressed to me, of relinquishing their purchases, and forfeiting the instalments already paid. In Richmond, where the disastrous results of the Bank mania have been pre-eminently conspicuous, and where real estate has fallen 50 to 75 per cent. there having been several instances in which property having been sold, payable in three or four instalments, has, after the payment of all the previous instalments, been transferred to the seller to discharge the last. It is estimated that more than one half of the city and its immediate vicinity is mortgaged to the banks. In Baltimore, about one-third is similarly situated, and property there is only prevented from exhibiting a depreciation nearly equal to that of Richmond, by the policy adopted by the banks of holding it, in the expectation that its gradual advance will pay them a better interest for their money than could be obtained from investments or discounts, if they were to force a sale. A house and store were pointed out to me in Baltimore, in the principal commercial street, which about 1816 were let for 2000 dollars per annum, but are now let at only 600. This is an extreme case; but taking the city generally, it would probably be correct to estimate the decline in rents at from 40 to 50 per cent. Real estate has fallen from 33 to 50 per cent; the interruption to the intercourse between the United States and the West Indies, having raised the calamities of this town to a level with the general distress in which it might otherwise have participated less deeply than some of its neighbours, from having been visited less severely with those worse than Egyptian plagues, bank discounts of accommodation notes, renewable ad infinitum. Labour here, as in all slave States, falls almost exclusively on the slaves: and the porterage of the town, the loading and discharging of ships, &c. are performed by those who are either hired out by their masters by the week, or allowed, on paying their masters a certain sum, generally about two dollars per week, to find work for themselves and retain the surplus. Allowing for the different effects of a system of this kind and a system of free labour, and fully aware how slowly, though certainly, the price of labour follows the price of provisions, I was surprised to find that while the latter has fallen two-thirds, the former has declined less than a fourth. This is owing partly to the circumstance of the owners of the coloured labourers being able to hold out on any particular occasion against an attempt to reduce their wages; an attempt which can seldom be effectually resisted by persons whose daily labour must obtain their daily bread; partly to conscientious scruples, which deter many holders of hereditary or domestic slaves from trafficking in humun flesh, and others from buying their fellow-creatures to hire them out like cattle; but principally to such an irregularity of demand as renders it impossible to adjust the supply to its casual fluctuations, and induces a necessity of including in the remuneration for the hours employed, some compensation for those lost in waiting for employment. Slaves, who in Norfolk are now worth on an average 300 to 400 dollars each, receive from the merchant who engages their services, seventy-five cents per day, and their food. These are enormous wages, where turkeys, weighing five or six pounds, will sell for Is. 9d. sterling, and wild ducks at 2s per couple; and where flour is four dollars per barrel, Indian corn, their favourite food, forty cents per bushel, and beef and mutton five to eight cents per pound. As sailors, the master can obtain for their slaves ten dollars per month: and there are many families in Norfolk, especially many widows and orphans, whose property consists entirely of hereditary slaves, whom they hire out as the only means of obtaining an income. LETTER V. New-York, Dec. 24, 1820. I WROTE to you two long letters from Norfolk,which have not yet found a conveyance; and on the 22d I addressed to your care a long letter to, with an account of our visit to Norfolk and return to Baltimore. We left that city on the 18th, at three o'clock in the morning, in an open stage waggon, having decided to return to Philadelphia through York and Lancaster, instead of the old steamboat route, as it would occupy no more time. morning was bitterly cold; and as the roads were a sheet of ice, and our horses unprepared, we advanced only three miles an hour, for several hours, when we arrived at a German's, where we procured breakfast and fresh horses. The The face of the country, the thirty miles we continued in Maryland, presents, like almost every other part of that State which I have seen, a beautiful specimen of hill and dale, of which from one-third to one-half is woodland, young vigorous trees of second growth, so nearly of the same size, and so regularly disposed, that they perpetually suggest the idea that they have been planted by the hand of man. I know no part of England which would give you a precise idea of Maryland hill and dale. Sometimes the scenery reminded me of the forest lands near Loughborough; but the undulations are bolder, and succeed each other in interesting variety, as far as the horizon; sometimes of Derbyshire-Ashbourne for instance —but the hills are less frequently broken by abrupt and precipitous cliffs, or the dales contracted into deep romantic valleys. About thirty miles from Baltimore, we entered York county, in the State of Pennsylvania. For the first few miles the houses were of hewn log and plaster, like those of Maryland; afterwards of stone and brick. As we advanced, the face of the country, still beautiful, principally hill and dale, began to exhibit a much higher state of cultivation, and the houses assumed a more comfortable and prosperous appearance. We now obtained a sight of the fine barns for which the Germans are celebrated, and of which we had heard much. The land was worth from 10 to 50 dollars per acre, in farms of from fifty to two hundred acres, occupied almost exclusively by German proprietors. The instances of land being rented were rare; and in those cases the landlord usually received half the gross produce for rent. I was told, (and although I do not vouch for the entire accuracy of all the "on dits" I send you on subjects like this, I seldom give them unless I have had an opportunity of cross examination,) that the less opulent farmers in this neighbourhood expend scarcely any money in articles of consumption, either vesting their |