Vermont Telegraph

VERMONT TELEGRAPH.

A Counterpart to the Maryland Law!

The Corporation of the City of New-York have fined Henry Graves, a colored man, for using his hand-cart, to obtain an honest subsistence! Upon this, a petition was circulated, and signed by seventeen persons in the ward in which he lives, certifying that the petitioners "have known Henry Graves several years, and always as a sober, honest and industrious man; and that they esteem him worthy of a license for a hand-cart."

Among the petitioners are "merchants, carmen, doctors and lawyers;" and yet the petition is refused the least hearing! But the worst of the story is yet to be told. The Corporation do not refuse colored people license to sell rum! They may have license to scatter poison, plague and death! But they may not have license to own and use a horse and cart—or even a hand-cart—by which to obtain an honest livelihood, and procure bread for themselves and families! Only think of the Corporation of the City of New-York pouncing, like vultures, jackalls, and hyenas, upon an innocent individual colored man, and amercing him in a fine, to fill the public treasury with, because he is guilty of employing himself in the use of a hand-cart, to obtain subsistence! Here is robbery, and piracy, and outrage, and brutality, and meanness, paralleled nowhere else but in American slavery itself.

And all this in the City of New-York—the commercial emporium of this professedly most civilized and christianized nation—the meeting-place of the national moral and religious anniversaries! Was Nineveh, or Babylon, or Sodom ever guilty of such an act? And yet, while this city is the theatre of these dark deeds of hell, she is at the same time publishing, and throwing out to the world around, splendid accounts of her revivals of religion! Tell it not in the land of idols and caste! Publish it not among the benighted children of the heathen world. What are the christians of New-York City about? In what does their christianity consist? Where are their remonstrances against these infamous deeds of which pirates would be ashamed? Are their pulpits sending forth denunciations against such foul robbery—such infernal meanness? We shall see.