Staunton Vindicator

Non-Intercourse With the North.

There is a bill now pending before the Legislature of Virginia, which provides for a special license to sell of a stated class of goods, seeking to include in that class all the leading articles of consumption which may be most profitably manufactured in this State or imported into it directly from foreign countries.

In a most able speech, (which we regret very much our inability to publish in the Vindicator,) delivered by Mr. James Barbour, of Culpeper, before the House of Delegates on the 10th of February, the purpose and certain effects of this bill are elaborately set forth.

In that speech we find some very interesting statistics, to some of which we will briefly allude. It is stated, on the authority of reliable documents, that the factories of Massachusetts alone give employment to 96,000 male laborers and 69,000 female laborers; that the annual amount paid to these laborers is $89,700,000, and that the annual value of the fabrics manufactured is $150,000,000; almost the whole of which needs a home market, and the most of which a Southern market. Now, the first question which presents itself to every mind on consideration of these facts, is, what would be the effect on Massachusetts were the market for the proceeds of this immense amount of labor suddenly withdrawn? We do not hesitate to assert that the whole industrial system of New England would be completely prostituted if the Southern market should be closed against their manufactures. And when those hundreds of thousands of laborers who receive employment in the Northern factories--manufacturing fabrics for Southern consumption--see the Southern market closed against Northern manufactures-- when they see trade prostrated, and their labor no longer needed--when they begin to feel the effects of that fanaticism which has been the bane and curse of this Union--they will commence to enquire, "why this war of sections?" "why this intermeddling of the free States into the affairs of the slave States?"--and the succeeding elections will register a terrible and effective rebuke to the corrupt fanaticism which is hurrying the country to the brink of destruction.

Again: The Auditor's report shows that Virginia alone affords a market for the manufactures of the of the Northern States amounting to $40,000,000; and history tells us that the closing of the ports of the United States against the commerce of Great Britain, when that commerce only amounted to sixty-five millions of dollars annually, prostrated the whole industrial interests of England. It is legitimate to argue from this that the trade of the North would receive an almost fatal blow by the closing of the market of this State alone against her manufactures, even though the other Southern States refused to co-operate with her in this most wise movement.

It is a fact beyond doubt that the trade of the North--in other words, that the North--is at the mercy of the South; and if each of the Southern Legislatures would pass some such prohibitory bill that as that now pending before the Virginia Legislature, we would soon see the State Governments of the North forced into a conservative policy by the suffering capitalists and starving laborers of the free States.