The Northern Daily Times.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1856-07-24 00:00:00

as Atornin,

THE NORTHERN TIMES.---LIVERPOOL, THURSDAY.

is authoriti
ere. if

France will, of tours

he Progressites gain the day

and by chance the present QUEEN is required to

abdicate in favour of the Princess of AUSTRIA,
and ESPARTERO is appointed Regent, still France
will not interfere, and only will invade Spain in
case the Duchess de MONTPENSIER be declared

aeir, or that a Republic should be

" proclaimed." The " If's " employed in this-
memorable paragraph, are of extraordinary
Shakspearian importance ‘. If the new Govern-
" went iu Spain succeeds," and "if the Progress-
" ites gain the day," and this and that is done,
France will not interfere. But who can dream of
O'DONNELL'S and the Court's success in an
attempt to subvert the Constitution which
France ani England have guaranteed to the

Spaniards

The Progressites must triumph ultimately. Even
O'DONNELL, in the heat of his savage attack upon
the people of the capital, held out the olive branch
to the national party. He appeals lustily, and
like a victor, trembling at the enormity of his
success, and calls on the good sense and patriotism
of those whose lives he assailed, to support him in
his tyranny. This will not do. The reactionary
movement of Spain has for its sole object, the
restoration of all the Church and State abomi-
nations of FERDINAND'S reign. It aims at reducing
Spain to that appalling condition in which we
behold Italy. If she be suffered to collapse,
and to return to the horrors of absolute rule,
her territory will again be occupied by foreign
troops. Her civil tribunals will be filled by
military inquisitors, and her criminal courts
handed back to a no less unrelenting enemy
to Constitutional Government. Her people would
be ground down to the dust, by an unblush-
ing Camarilla, and the substance of the nation
would be wasted and devoured by an unbridled
court, and a debased aristocracy. The ghost of
FERDINAND would be in the midst of these revels,
and make much of the 'spirit of our times. But
there is surely something better in store for
betrayed and unhappy Spain, than a return to
that mental, bodily, political, civil and religious
prostration, from which the arms of France and
England have so recently raised her.

It will take more than the reactionary adven-
turer, O'DONNELL, to hurl her backward another cen-
tury behind all the rest of that same Europe she
once led in arms, literature, art, and science. Her
blood may be shed, as it has been for the last
fifty years by designing and wicked counsellors,
but so great a people—so chivalrous a race--must
yet regain that status which nature has marked
them for, and stand erect by the side of those
nations she has so often confronted on the field
of battle, and led on to the triumphs of civilisation.
We cannot despair of seeing her emancipated from

the thraldom of political intrigue, and freed from

ence of lawless hypocrites, who are but

early to play the part of hirelings, first to the
foreigner, and then to the native disturbers of

country's neace, while a true Spaniard
remains on the soil that gave him birth. The
Spanish citizen has tasted the sweets of the
civil and religious toleration—he knows what
Constitutional Freedom, rational and possible
progress really mean, and the people who rejected
DON CARLOS, with all his fanatical facinations and
liberal professions in politics, will assuredly over-
throw O'DONNELL and his Court ; and what will
Lord PALMERSTON do if the QUEEN should be com-
pelled to abdicate her throne, if the young PRINCESS
should not be chosen as her successor, and ESPAR-
TERO should not be appointed Regent, and France
should interfere?

IN our article of Saturday, on the reduction of

the duties on wines, we promised to return to that

!;X.CFIEQITER'S

speech in which we find " protection" associated
with drunkenness. When Legislators talk for a
considerable time on such subjects, they generally
become more or less groggy. They roll about,
and multiply the length of their journey by care-
fully measuring and re-measuring the width of
the road they have to travel. We do not mean
to say by this, that Sir CORNEWALL LEwis was the
" worse for liquor," but he certainly did show that
the public morals, health, and happiness of this
country are most flagrantly sacrificed for revenue
The right honourable baronet told us that if
the weaker, and, consequently, less intoxicating
wines of the Continent were admitted at a low

duty, the retention of the present duties on
spirits and beer would operate as a 0 protection"
to the less destructive beverages. This would be

no objection to raise to a reduction of our wine
tariff. On the contrary, we want those who will
drink to use that which is the least injurious to
themselves and to society. A gill of pure wine
is the equivalent of a quart of the best
beer. The former would not make a man
drunk and disorderly. The latter does ; there-

fore it is obviously the duty of the Legis-

lature to adjust the imposts on wine, so that
üblic may obtain weaker and wholesome

irink at the same price as beet

No one can pretend to say that the English
people would not use wine generally, until the
experiment has been tried. Nor is it good logic
to assert that a high rate of duty on spirits would
act as a " protection" to the less destructive
beverages; for it brings us at once to this conelu•
sion, that the high duties levied on tea, coffee,

nd sugar, are a " protection" to drunken_

It is true we derive, according to the

CHANCELLOR of the Esc

QUER'S showing, only

10,418,0001. from the above necessaries of life,
while the fermented liquors produce a revenue of
23,062,0001. annually. But how much further, we

will ask, could " protection" to the consumption of
spirits and beer be carried ? Get within fifty per
cent. of the equalisation of duties on fermented
and unfermented articles, and mark the falling
ff in the consumption of the latter. Let it
abroad that beer is as cheap as
tea, rum as economical as cocoa, and that coffee is
dearer than gin, and there will be an end of the
increasing demand for the beverages virtually pro-
hibited. There is here something more, it will be
observed, than a mere question of revenue to be
considered, in the discussion of this subject.

once get

We will not say that those who appear wholly to
disregard the cause of temperance, in legislating

for revenue, would intentionally raise the
duties on the necessaries of life, to protect
those commodities which fill the land with drunk.
enuess and crime; but that such is the practical
effect of their measures is admitted by them-
selves. According to the admission of Sir CORNE"
WALL LEWIS, with regard to the reduction of duty
on wine, if those charged on tea, coffee, and sugar
were lowered, the result would be, that the high
duties on spirits and beer would protect the con-
sumption of those articles. This is the important
admission to which we directed special attention
on Saturday. It places the whole matter in an
entirely new light, and one which is not likely to
be forgotten, either in or out of Parliament. When
drunkenness and crime are reduced to mere
questions of revenue, we think we shall be justified
in announcing the advent of Free Trade, in
the " weaker wines of the Continent," and in
tea, coffee, and sugar. " Protection" would have

no friends in such a movement ; and once the actual

cost the country is put to, for the repression of
offences committed through drinking, is carefully
balanced with the cost incurred for the promotion
of order and sobriety, the public will be found

ready to make up the difference from another

source

It must not be said of Great Britiin that she
cannot command fiscal means for legitimate
purposes. Our industry is too great, our labour
too valuable, our genius too diversified, our
national pride too exalted, and our resources,
active and dormant, too vast, to admit of even a
whisper of our inability, or indisposition, to do
whatever is necessary to sustain the honour and
well-being of the State. The great problems of
this age do not differ from those which have
gone before them. Time brings its work—its
changes,—and the query is, how to do it—how to
effect them with the least injury and greatest
advantage to the common weal. The difficulties
of the British Exchequer to-day, are trifling to
what they have been at former periods. We have
a heavy debt hanging over us ; but we have
stupendous means to meet our obligations. Our
power to pay may be seriously cramped by our
conventional and party crochets, but there the
substance is, and all the people ask is that
taxation may be spread over it wisely and equally.
The poor man can do but little. The rich are
always ready to discharge their duty to the State ;
and when our fiscal burdens are so arranged as
not to bear too heavily on the working man's
necessaries, as a " protection" to the source of
his degradation, and the increase of crime, we
shall have reached an era of peace, contentment,
and growing morality, which will relieve the
Imperial Exchequer of one of its most threaten.
in g exigencies.