Lynchburg Daily Virginian

Internal Improvement

The time has been, and we all know how recently, that Virginia looked with stolid indifference upon the many and great improvements projected and executed by the sister States around her. To the persuasive hopes of commercial power thus held forth to her in example, she was immovable; and in response to the warnings of the age and the exhortations of the spirit of progress on every side of her, she calmly pointed, as though her glory were there too entombed, to the graves of her illustrious dead Of the Federal Government, which has now disdainfully kicked her from its Councils, she had assumed the kindly and especial guardianship. At Washington were her only politics--and they were merged in the cesspool of federal corruption. Her talents, and her energy were centered to the same point, where, led on by selfish and designing partisans, she had floundered, as though bound to it with bands of steel, after the car of party politics. Virginia, concerned in common with the other States of the Union in the conduct and purity of the Federal Administration, has been nevertheless its self-elected Argus--expounding abstractions and subdividing hairs and paper, whilst her sister confederates have been throwing around her fetters of iron, and cutting off from her people those bounteous avenues of life and power with which by nature she was endowed. But a change--a change from which we believe innumerable blessings may result to the State--has come o'er the spirit of her dreams. Virginia has doubtless over-shot the mark--gone rather too far in prodigality of expenditure under the force of that change--But, as a convert to new ideas, and with the enthusiasm natural to her new state, the excesses, such as have been indulged in, are venial when compared with the drowsy apathy of which she had almost become a proverb. A prize, rich as ever fascinated the vision of any people, has been and is now before her. She has struck for it, and it must be hers: nature has given it her, and her iron arms will soon reach and embrace it. That prize is the accumulating millions of wealth that float on the waters of the mighty West, and that are even now forced from the very borders of western Virginia to seek outlets hundreds and thousands of miles around her north and south, for the purpose of reaching the channels of the world's commerce on her eastern shore. That is the prize to be won; and let Virginia open passages eastwardly for those products on the steam car through her rich valleys, and along the teeming alluvions of her rivers, and an influence like that of Spring's will be diffused on every side, from which interests now dormant or forgotten, will insensibly arise in the freshness and bloom of vigor and of life.