Belmont Chronicle

Two Tomb-Stones.

As a general rule, human beings in selecting the rewards of their own labor prefer cash to tomb-stones—a fact which Mr. Thomas Moore noticed in his monody upon the death of Sheridan. If a master-mechanic should assemble his journeymen-carpenters and should say to them: My dear fellows and devoted friends! I have noticed the extreme vigor with which you plane and the splendor of your sawing, and how charmingly you hit the nails on their heads. I shall not insult you by offering you money, which you would only foolishly squander if I should give it to you; but I have determined, if you will only work for me during your natural lives, and work well, and not grumble, to give to each of you the prettiest grave-stones in the world, all with flattering inscriptions setting forth your many virtues, and particularly how you cheerfully worked for me without making any charge therefor. All of which I doubt not will be satisfactory to you: ingenious minds."

Our own impression is that the famous hammerers and dexterous sawyers would decline to offer as one unsuited to their modest tastes. At the South, however, and under the beautiful influences of the Institution, it seems to be different—a grave-stone being the great object of life with the faithful African. At least, that appears to be the opinion of The Fayetteville (N. C.) Observer. The editor of that paper recently had occasion to go into a grave-yard, doubtless for purposes of moral reflection and philosophic study, and while there actually discovered in the part allotted to slaves "two marble tomb-stones." What proportions these "two" monumental wonders bore to the undistinguished resting places of less fortunate chattels, we are not told; but they so attracted the attention of this able editor that he immediately went home and wrote a leading article on the subject, headed "What is African Slavery!" He seems to have come to the sage conclusion that whereas the system occasionally gives a grave stone to a departed slave, it is altogether a beautiful one, to be sustained by the united intellectual, moral, and political energies of the Republic. He writes, evidently, upon the presumption that free negroes never have their mortal lives cheered by the prospect of monuments after death, and that they must therefore be unhappy—a grave-stone being the one thing worth living for, or rather worth dying for. His dilations upon these points are charmingly humane and sympathetic, and, in fact, the highest water-cart style.

Tombstone No. I. was erected "by the mistress of the family over the remains of a most valuable servant and friend, and it bore the inscription "My Own Good Lucy." There is consideration—there is loving requital for you! Twenty, perhaps thirty, it may have been forty years of chamber-work or of kitchen-work, of dress-making, or of hair-dressing, of daily obedience, of hourly devotion, and when the weary toil is over, and the faithful feet can no longer come at call and the loyal hands can no longer minister, all this service is repaid by a place in the black quarter of the cemetery, by a marble slab, and an epitaph of the Lyrica Langush descriptian! Ample reward! who would not have been "My Own Good Lucy," "most valuable," (say $1,000) before death, and so sincerely (we have no doubt) lamented afterward? There has been nothing like it since Byron gave his dog a monument at Newstead. No wonder the Fayette man did write his touching article to let a weeping world know all about "My Own Good Lucy."

Tombstone No. II. was inscribed "UNCLE HARRY. MARK THE PERFECT MAN!" Now, we are at a loss to decide what this inscription means. Does it refer to "Uncle Harry" physically? That he was what a dealer would pronounce "sound," and A 1 for the New Orleans market? We suppose not, for he is spoken of by The Observer as "an old man." He was a Baptist. He could read his Bible, and he read it. It is also mentioned that his wife was "an excellent cook"—a remarkable combination of merits in "one lot." Whether "the excellent cook," if dead, got a grave stone or has a fair prospect of that ornamental remembrancer to solace her stewing and roasting labors, we are not informed.

Such stuff as this Fayetteville (N. C.) Observer perpetrates is always caught up by the dough press, and especially by the dough religious press, and is paraded ostentatiously, as if it really meant something.— So far as it goes to prove anything touching the slave system, its good influence upon the master, its justice to the slave, its ameliorating character—information of this nature is worse than useless, for it deludes some honest, well-meaning, and weak people out of the common sense with which the system should be considered. Nobody says that there are not contented slaves.— Nobody says that there are not individual cases in which the relation is not a happy one. But nobody, upon these isolated cases, appealing to sensibility rather than sense, will pretend to judge of a great system, which must be theoretically bad, and is known to be bad in practice.—N. Y. Tribune.