Vermont Watchman And State Journal

Black and White Perjury.

A Richmond paper has the following characteristic remarks:

"In old times, when a negro committed perjury, the sentence of the law required that his ears should be nailed to the public pillory (which was constructed on every court-green) and then and there cut off! A caution to culprits, when he was sworn and called upon to testify, that this punishment awaited him if he did not tell the truth, it is said to have always brought it out of him. Unless some such means as this shall be resorted to there will never be any chance of preventing perjury in negro witnesses, for they have no respect for the sanctity of an oath and no idea of the enormity of forswearing. For more than two hundred years they were engaged in Virginia in humanizing and Christianizing the African, as they claimed, through the patriarchal institution of slavery. By their own confession above they could not be held to have met with very great success, when the cutting off of ears is reckoned to have been among the most salutary of mutual restraints. Perhaps the difficulty was in the teachers. Our officers and soldiers stationed in Virginia during the war had occasion often to make the same comments on white residents' habitual disregard of his oath of allegiance which are applied in the above extract to "cuffee's" addiction to perjury. Again, the organs of the chivalry are just now making a great outcry against that clause of the Constitutional amendment which would prevent those men from holding offices of trust and honor who broke their oaths to the Government of the United States in order to take new oaths to the fictitious "Southern Confederacy." They think that these perjured men have done nothing worthy of blame, while "cuffee," for disregarding his oath in a case affecting himself to the extent of twenty-five cents, ought to have his ears cut off! Human nature is a curiosity, especially down in Virginia.—Boston Journal.