The Northern Daily Times.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1856-06-07 00:00:00

itor!,Bm

THE NORTHERN TIMES.---LIVERPOOL,

entertaining their Bill is questioned, and
eventually it is thrown out. For the honour
of our country we hope this story will not pass
beyond the shores of England—we trust it will
not spread beyond the edges of the direct road
which connects Liverpool with St. Stephens.

Such Parliamentary romances are not fit to meet
the eye of this sober and practical age. Men do
not relish, in real life, those flights of fancy, which
they laugh at in a work of fiction, or in a dramatic
burlesque. The dock promoting side of our
Town Council may often be in the wrong, but
in this instance they are in the right, so far as in.
troducing their bill as the completement of the Act
of 1855, is concerned. As for the plans, they were
a secondary consideration altogether. If the Cor-
poration, in getting the Dock Estate into their
hands, saw that certain improvements might be
made to the benefit of all parties concerned, we
must be excused when we tell Sir WILLIAM CLAY,
and his Committee, that it was their duty to have
heard the evidence of the promoters, and that they
ook a very novel course when they rejected the
As a

whole Bill on the evidence of the opposition
ourse is pregnant with danger
in a case of
to sanction its bein
3r magnitude, and the HousE
mmons should bestow
acts of Their Committees, before any further abr
gation of constitutional law and usage become
matters of record.

It has

ted t

efficient

cited in

)me attention on the

The hardships and injustice of our ease,
are only equalled by the public inconven-
ience which must follow delay in the exe-
cution of the work which remains to be
done before the Docks can be made to produce a
revenue, adequate to the expenditure the pur-
chasers have already made. If left without our
bill, we may be left without a Birkenhead Dock
income, and then who will work that portion of
the Dock accommodation of the Mersey ? Did
such a query as this enter the mind of the Com_
mittee ? But who are the parties really to blame
for the defeat of the Dock Completement
Act ? We answer, emphatically, the Great
Western and Birkenhead and Chester Railway
Companies ! If they had merely wished to give

a preference to Mr. RENDELL'S plans over Mr
HARTLEY'S they would have waited until the Com-
mittee came to the clause which related to the
adoption of plans. But they did nothing of the
sort. They attacked the preamble of the bill, and
in that way got it thrown out aztierement. Now, it
is quite true that the public have a deep interest at
stake in the construction of docks, and that the best
and most economical designs ought to be selected,
but there were large pecuniary interests involved
in this Bill, which ought to have been gone into by
the Committee, even if they saw fit not to adopt
either of the plans brought before them.

What, then, are we to think of the whole
affair? Are we to couple it with the vulgar
leading article of the London Times of Thursday,

which carries its author's name on its face
and the animus which suggested the appoint.

ment of Mr. LOWE'S committee? Shall we
be sb vain glorious as to say, That Liverpool is be-
coming too metropolitan for Middlesex, to tolerate
our further growth in commercial and maritime
magnificence ? Or must we throw aside the little
good breeding we possess, and tell the writer of the
Cockney attack on the rights of municipal pro-
perty, that it is one of the greatest public frauds
ever attempted, and that he resorts to wilful lying,
when he says that we derive an income of
600,000/. a year from Town Dues levied "on

" the imports and exports of the greatest
" manufacturing country in the world." That
scribe only seeks to openly gull Vie mercan-
tile community, when he says :—" the liberation
of commerce from such burdens is a necessary
"pendant to the system of Free Trade, which has

received the unanimous assent of the country."
man in Parliament, knows

Every commercial

hat value to I

)n this glaring piece

of impo

Mr. I

aqtee, it is well known,

3 liberate commerce from the
tolls or dues whatever. All

Ur. LowE and the London Times are trying to
accomplish is to push forward the work of centra-
lisation, to trample on the principles of local self-
government, to place the collection and disposal of

local dues and rates in the hands of Government
Boards, and this is what is called, " a pendant to
" the system of Free Trade which has received the
" unanimous assent of the country." Such a bare-
faced piece of deception was never before played
off on the community; and we must confess that
the course taken by the Birkenhead Dock Com-
mittee looks very like a continuation of that spirit
of hostility of which the inhabitants of this
Borough must take some notice, and without
further delay.

A correspondent has called our attention to a
letter which appeared in the Bankers' Circular on
Saturday last, complaining that a British sove_
reign coined in Australia—a British colony--of
English standard, fineness, weight, and value,
is not a legal tender in the mother country, and
can only be used, therefore, as bullion in commer-
cial transactions between two integral portions
of the same dominions ! Surely this has brought
us to the culminating point of human absur-
dity ! What lofty and perfect ideas of Empire
our rulers must have ! The doctrine of integrality
of dominion appears to be as little understood in
these days as the laws of affinity were in those of
Tursco. Among the latest arrivals from Australia,
were 80,000 sovereigns coined at the colonial
mint, and a question was directly raised by a
commercial house in London, whether these coins
were legal tender within the realm of Great
Britain and Ireland. "The case stands thus," says
the enquirer :—" It is assumed that the Australian
" sovereigns are of standard weight and purity ; if
" so, the foreigner would take them in payment of
any debt due to him, since he never looks to the
denomination of the currency of any other
ry than his own, except that a certain
" portion of that currency represents and will
procure in his own country a certain quantity of

" count

" precious metal. This property resides in the
" Australian sovereign, which is, indeed, formed
" out of the very same quality of gold as the British
" sovereign. But the reasoning assumes a different
" form when it is applied to the United Kingdom.
" The French Louis d' Or, or Napoleon, is not a
" legal tender with us, because struck at a foreign
" mint; the Australian sovereign is struck at a
" Colonial mint; as bits of bullion the Australian
" and English sovereigns are equivalent. So far,
"no difficulties arise." Certainly hot, until the
Colonial sovereign is put into circulation.

When you twit
any Itlnd, the Ai

t to pay (int

3 or taxes of

ralian coin

only so much

f(

:11 the holder must take what he

The Sta

which has created it, will not

receive it as money

If it reaches England in the

f trade, it must go to the Bank of

England and be re-coined—for which the public
have to pay—before it becomes legal tender ; and
when the same sovereign gets back to Australia,

gold may be at a discount, then comes another
" shave," and the expense of a second re coining.
The English sovereign is legal tender in the colo-
nies, and why the Australian counterpart of that
piece of money should not possess the same legal
qualities here, is a problem few can solve. The
Bank of England is compelled to buy all the gold,
of standard fineness, which may be taken to them,
at 3/ 17s. 9d. the ounce, and they receive from the
Mint 31. 17s. 100., legal tender, for every ounce of
bullion they send to be coined. This will explain
the Bank's interest in the matter. But if this
kingdom and its vast dependencies are to be con-
sidered, and form one great, indissoluble, integral
empire, why should not our metallic money be Im-
perial and possess the same attributes, and discharge
the same functions in all parts of our dominions?
Why put the Colonist to the expense of coining his
gold and sending it to this country to be re coined
before it becomes legal tender, or before it can be
recognised by the Imperial Government as any-
thing more than so much bullion ? The fact will
no sooner be made known, that Colonial sove-
reigns are not receivable at their mint value in
e of debts and taxes, than they will be at a
discount in our rapidly increasing inter••colonial

discharg

trading transactions

From such gross perversions of common sense
no good can arise. On the contrary, it keeps alive
all those feelings of distrust which the colonists
entertain towards the parent State; and it is high
time to endeavour to remove all such impressions,
and give consistency and unity to the whole of our
boundless Empire. In the prosperity of our
Colonies lies our greatness, and in their progress
we have a promise of the world's civilisation.
Spread far and near the British race, and
assimilate their laws and institutions—treat
each British Continent, island, and rock which
is separated from our shores by the sea, as the
members of one enlightened family—and who
can question the result ? This is how the affections,
loyalty, and patriotism of a widely scattered race
are to be directed towards and fixed on one com-
mon centre Let us not treat the Australian coin
which we ourselves undertake to make, gibingly.
Their sovereign is theinstrument of trade—the only
hope of the Colonist. The interest the Bank of Eng—
land has in the important question under review
is purely local, and the position of the Cabinet,
who sanctioned the establishment of the Austra-
lian mint, wholly untenable. British gold coin
should be, and is, so far, of standard fineness,
weight, and value, and ought to be legal tender
throughout her MAJESTY'S dominions ; and we
hope to hear that some of those members of
Parliament, who understand the real monetary
and commercial bearings of such all anomaly, will
seize an early opportunity of bringing the matter
under the notice of the Imperial Senate and the
public.

MONETARY AND COMMERCIAL,

LIVERPOOL, FRIDAY EVENING

In the Cotton trade, under the influence of the
reduction in the rate of discount from 6 to 5 per
cent., a good and general demand sprung up at the
close of last week; but on receipt of the America's
accounts on Monday, these showing no falling off
in the receipts of cotton at the shipping ports, and
therein disappointing common expectation, the
Market again relapsed into its previous dulness
and depression—in which state it has since con-
tinued to rule, the demand having in the meanwhile
been uniformly very limited, and prices having
gradually yielded from 1-16 d to id per lb. in Ame-
rican descriptions pretty generally—the decline,
however, being being most marked in cotton below
6d per lb.—in other kinds no definite change can
be noticed, but in all the tendency has been with
the buyer. The sales of the week amount to 50,100
bales, 41,810 of which have been taken by the trade,
6,780 for speculation, and 1,510 for export. To day's
business is estimated at 7,000 bales, 500 of which
have been taken for speculation and export. The
Committee's quotations to-day for fair cotton are as
follows, viz.:—Bowed 61d, Mobile 61, and Orleans
7d per lb.
The amount of business done in the Share
Market has not been large to-day, but prices closed
steady at the following quotations :—Aberdeen, 13
131. Chester and Birkenhead, 151 16. Caledonian,
304 30k. Chester and Holyhead, 161 161 Eastern
, Counties, 10 1.1610 3.16. East Lancashire, 194 191
Great Northern, 231 24i. Ditto A, 91 10k. Great
Western, 601 61. Lancashire and Yorkshire Stock
92/ 921. Liverpool, Crosby and Southport, 174173,
London and North Western Stock, 101, 102. Man-
chester Sheffield, and Lincoln, 29/ 291 Ditto Pref.,
Pref.;
111 111. Ditto New 6 per cent. Pre , ap. Mid-
land Stock, 791 791. North British, 81 9. North
Staffordshire, 6 51d. South Eastern and Dover,
21 7-16 21 9-16. York, Newcastle, and Berwick,
20 3-16 20 5-16. York and North Midland, 29k 291.
Leeds Capital Stock, 171- 171. Buffalo and Lake
Huron, :11 lip. Dutch Rhenish, 11 lip. Great
Western of Canada, 25i 254. Ditto New Shares,
2 11-16 2 13-16 p. Great Luxembourg, 8a 81d.
We quote the following report of the Tallow
Trade from Mr. F. J. Eaton's circular :
Only small sales are reported at 47s 6d to 48s 6d per
cwt. for P. Y. C., and 48s to 49s per cwt. for N. and S.
American. There has been little change in the London
market during the week, but at the close yesterday,
rather lower prices were accepted, the exact quotations
being 45s 9d per cwt for spot and last 3 months. The
half-week delivery is elo casks, against 510 casks last
year, and the present stock 17,709 casks, against 47,152
in 1855.

The Colonial Produce Markets during the past
week have been rather quiet, but the .values of
most of the principal staples have been supported.
For sugar there has been a good demand, and an
advance of 6d to is per cwt. has occurred. Coffee
has been dull of sale. In rice transactions have
been limited, and tea has ruled much the same as
previously. For spices there was not much inquiry,
and mace is rather cheaper. Rum has been in
more request, and tallow has ruled quiet.
The Paris Wool Market, which has been so
active during thq last few months with some
apprehensions amongst the manufacturers of a
scarcity of supplies, has resumed its usual steady
appearance, and the high prices are beginning to
recede. This state of affairs has been influenced
by the withdrawal of some American orders, on
account of the stocks of fine fabrics lying on
hand at New York, and the large pur-
' chases made by the manufacturers of Aus-
tralian Wool in the London Market• The
effect of this upon the ensuing clip will be to
depreciate its value from 20 to 15 per cent.
The wool growers, however, are standing out
for their prices, and those who were obliged
to close their contracts have paid from if 35c
to if 500 per half-kilogramme. Advices from
Marseilles report an active market there, with
the following importations :-380 bales from
Alexandria, 380 ditto from TuniE, 435 ditto
from Casabianca, and 180 bales from Constan-
tinople. At the sales by auction several hundred
hales of Buenos Ayres wool were sold at former
prices, and the quotations generally were well
maintained.

Letters from St. Petersburg mention that the
Emperor has given his sanction to the establish-
ment of two Joint Stock Companies. One, having
for its object the manufacture of sugar, has been
granted to the eminent financier, Baron Stieglitz ;
and the other is for the purpose of forming a
Maritime Assurance Company at Riga. Each of
these societies is founded with a capital of
1,000,000 silver roubles, or about 165,000/.
Accounts from Madrid state that the Cortes•
have unanimously declared their satisfaction of
the financial operation of the government for
mortgaging two hundred millions of reals of the
floating debt.
The prospectus of the Euphrates Valley Railway
Company (limited) is issued, with a capital of one
million sterling, in 50,000 shares of 20/. each, on
which the deposit is to be only 2s per share. This
is a remarkable undertaking. The Mediterranean
and the Persian Gulf are to be connected by a
railway from the ancient port of Selucia, via
Antioch and Aleppo, to Jailer Castle, on the
Euphrates. This line will be about 80 miles in
length, and is afterwards to be carried down" to
Bagdad and to the head of the Persian Gulf,
whence steam communication will be established
with all parts of India. It is also proposed to carry
telegraphic wires along the route, with a view to
eventually uniting the European telegraphic sys-
tem with that of India.