The Northern Daily Times.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1857-05-30 00:00:00

then our Ministers should be so %tringent with
Brazil, and be so lenient with Spain, that
behaves so faithlessly. Our Government must be
urged to turn the screw on Spain, to hold her
strictly to treaty ; France and England have the
same interest in this matter, and surely Spain
could not resist the effectual remonstrance
of the Western Powers. perhaps the saddest
part of the story is, that our very endeavours to
put down by armed interference this accursed
traffic is said to increase the horrible sufferings
of the middle passage. Low and quick-sailing
craft are built to elude our war ships; four feet
high between the beams where the poor miserable
creatures cannot stand upright; here the
wreched captives of both sexes are crowded like
herrings into a barrel, and the result is beyond
what tongue can tell or heart conceive. We
si-ken at the thought. It is enough to smite
the earth with a curs-. It does and must curse,
and blight, and blast the enslaved and the
enslaver. In the name of outraged humanity we
demand what can be done to purge the earth of
this foul pollution—this complication of crimes
—prolonged from year to year, and from genera-
tion to generation.

THE Water Committee have suffocated

,hemselves in their own slime. As a committee,

,hey have lost public confidence, and may

consider themselves defunct.

In our condem-

nation of this Committee we have invariably

dealt with them, not in their individual, but in
their corporate capacity. At the same time, if
any individual member, presuming on the

prestige of a name 1r a position, hazarded
statements of which he was either entirely
ignorant, or felt disposed to distort to

suit a purpose, it became our duty to
deal with that person in his individual capacity,
and not permit him to shelter himself under the
shadow of thatlifiction, a committee. If, therefore,
in the course we have hitherto pursued, in cen-

suring the proceedings of the Water Committee
in their attempt to force the obnoxious Pike

water down the throats of the community, we

have used unqualified language, that as
a general rule is applicable to the committee.
When, however, we have been compelled, as

we often have, to take individuals to task, they
have themselves only to blame for the castiga-
tions which. in the discharge of our public
duty, we have been reluctantly compelled to
administer.

We believe, with the veriest apologist of the
Water Committee, that, as individuals, a more
honourable body of men exist not in the world.
As a committee, one more thoroughly obnoxious
never existed. That is their character in a very
few words. True, it may be said, they are
not responsible for all the jobbery and deception
which has been perpetrated in their name ; that
they had no opinion of their own; that they
were mere instruments in carrying out the
views of others—in palming off statements in
the Council and elsewhere as facts, and lending
the sanction of their names to the same, which
proved to be no facts, but palpable fictions.
This is a fatality, unfortunately, in our day, of
no rare occurrence, to which all public bodies are
liable. But when the truth is fully doveloped—
when the fraud is made as palpable as the noon-
day sun, what are we to think of the men who
would still seek to cloak their own weakness,
and screen from punishment their interested
agents, who, to serve their own purposes, had
been the guilty parties in involving them in

degradation.
The Water Committee stand before the world
a condemned body of men. Trials they have
had innumerable, yet they cry out for more.
They may have one trial, and one only, which
will prove their honesty and sincerity, and this
is that they tender their resignations ,forthwith.
That will demonstrate their 'patriotism. The
council desire it, but out of a kindly feeling they
would not say so. The whole town wish it, and
the Committee well know that it is so. Let
them no longer use the influence of their names

to bolster up a cause redolent of all that is
hateful, but abjure it at once and for ever,

Leaving to others the power of determining

whether the bog washings of Rivington or the
sparkling water from our wells is the best suited
for all the requirements and varied wants of this
great community, together with our most
inportant floating population.
The last wretched blind attempted to he
thrown in the eves of the people of Liverpool,
namely, that when the Rake-brook and the
Roddlesworth reservoirs are completed, there
will be a greater supply of pure water than is
now obtained from the Rivington reservoir, to
the extent of three or four millions of gallons per
diem, is like all the other fallacies which have
preceded it. Why, the whole of the spring
water in the district alluded to is already
condemned for compensations. The only portion
available for the requirements of Liverpool
is moss water, infinitely darker than that at
Anglezark. Besides, every drop of this water,
if ever any can be spared, has to flow through the
beautiful goit, which—deny it as the partisans
of the Pike may—is now, and ever must be, the
receptacle for all the foul abominations poured
into it from the villages along its banks. Yet
it is mainly on this phantom of a pretext that
the Water Committee obtained their three
months' indulgence from the Council.
The talk about filters is simply ridiculous, as
a general rule ; but even filtration swill not alter
the vital qualities of the Pike water, were it
possible of application in every house in town.

The assumption of certain parties, that because