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DEDICATION.

TO THE HONORABLE HENRY A. WISE.


DEAR SIR:

I dedicate this work to you, because I am acquainted with no one who has
so zealously, laboriously and successfully endeavored to Virginianise
Virginia, by encouraging, through State legislation, her intellectual
and physical growth and development; no one who has seen so clearly the
evils of centralization from without, and worked so earnestly to cure or
avert those evils, by building up centralization within.

Virginia should have her centres of Thought at her Colleges and her
University, centres of Trade and Manufactures at her Seaboard and
Western towns, and centres of Fashion at her Mineral Springs.

I agree with you, too, that State strength and State independence are
thenatural and
necessary institution, we remove the greatest stumbling block to belief
in the Bible; for whilst texts, detached and torn from their context,
may be found for any other purpose, none can be found that even
militates against slavery. The distorted and forced construction of
certain passages, for this purpose, by abolitionists, if employed as a
common rule of construction, would reduce the Bible to a mere allegory,
to be interpreted to suit every vicious taste and wicked purpose.

But we have been looking merely to one side of human nature, and to that
side rendered darker by the false, antagonistic and competitive
relations in which so-called liberty and equality place man.

Man is, by nature, the most social and gregarious, and, therefore, the
least selfish of animals. Within the family there is little room,
opportunity or temptation to selfishness--and