The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1839-01-04 00:00:00

Voetrg•

" 'THE POLAR STAR.

This star sinks below the horizon in certain latitudes.
I watched it sink lower and lower every night, till at last it
disappeared.
A star has left the kindling sky—
A lovely northern light—
How many planets are on high,
But that has left the night.

I miss its bright familiar face,
It was a friend to me,
Associate with my native place,
And those beyond the sea.

It rose upon our English sky,
Shone o'er our English land,

And brought back many a loving a}•e,
And many a gentle hand.

It seemed to answer to my thought,
It called the past to mind,
And with its welcome presence brought
All I had left behind.

The voyage it lights no longer, ends
Soon on a foreign shore :
How can I but recall the friends,
Who I may see no more ?

Fresh from the pain it was to part—
How could 1 bear the pain ?
Yet strong the omen in my heart
That says—We meet again.

Meet with a deeper, dearer love,
For absence shows the worth
Of all from which we then remove,
Friends, home, and native earth.

Thou lovely polar star, mine eyes
Still turned the first on thee,
Till I have felt a sad surprise
That none looked up with me.
But thou hest sunk below the wave
Thy radiant place unknown;
I seem to stand beside a grave,
And stand by it alone.
Farewell l—ab, would to me were given
A power upon thy light,
What words upon our English heaven
Thy loving rays should write !
Kind messages of love and hope
Upon thy rays should be;
Tby shining orbit would have scope
scarcely enough for me.
Ob, fancy vain as it is fond,
And little needed too,
My friends! I need not look beyond
My heart to look for you!' "

CONTEMPORARY PRESS.

THE ARREST OF MR. STEPHENS.

( From Ike Morning Herald.)
aThe time has not long gone by, since whig, states-
men and philosophers were.wont to proclaim from the
house-tops, during every day of each passing year,
that for ail the miseries which prevail in a community
the governors of that community ought to be held re-
sponsible. In conformity with this principle, the pre-
sent occupants of office, and other influential members
of the whig party, did not scruple to trace the rural
incendiary fires of 1830 to the alleged vices of the
Duke of Wellington's government ; whilst, conversely,
the whigs themselves have, for every partial gleam of
prosperity that has cheered the country since their ac-
cession to place, assumed the most unqualified credit.
Thus, they placed to the credit of their principles the
suspension of the incendiary fires alluded to; and
every impulse, in like manner, to the national indus-
try, which might be traced to the influence of joint
stock banks, or even of bubble speculations, has been
boldly claimed by the whigs, as an emanation at not
more than one remove from the pure spirit of whig-
gery.

By the test to which they have, in former days, so
confidently appealed,.and on the result of the applica-
tion of which they so unceremoniously condemned
their political antagonists, must the whigs themselves
now be content to be tried. Let that test, then, be
applied to the state of affairs in any part of the British
empire—after that empire has been blessed for now
eight long years with the benefit of whig sway—and
what will he the conclusions in which we must rest?
If the condition of public affairs must, as whig wise
men have always proclaimed, reflect faithfully the cha-
racter of the policy adopted by our rulers, what cha-
racter shall we assign to that policy which presides
over the aff.hs of India, of Canada, of Ireland—which
has sanctioned the (to use no harsh term) equivocal
condition to which our navy has been reduced—and
which has stimulated millions of our manufgcturing
population into a state bordering upon madness ? Let
the whigs themselves supply the inevitable answer.
The.whigs, to be sure, are in the habit of laying the
dangerous condition of the manufacturing population
at the door of Oastler and Stephens—the "incendiary
agitators" of the north ! But the Whigs must have
strangely forgotten their "philosophy" before ventur-
ing on such an assumption as is involved in that
charge! Our " liberal" economists have always
taught that mere " incendiary harangues" must al-
ways go for less than nothing, excepting in cases
where real and deep-seated grievances lend to such
harangues a dangerous degree of force. It is, how-
ever, the duty of every government to Put down "in-
cendiaries;" and the whigs have, accordingly, at
tengtt; weron,),l t. arrest Mr. gt.piwnc_ That arreui,
and the mode in which the consequent examination of
the alleged " traitor" was conducted, have, as yet,
added little to the government's reputation for wis-
dom. They are, however, now bound to follow the
matter up. They are bound to prove Mr. Stephens
guilty of the crimes imputed to him; or they are
bound to admit that he has been most grossly injured
and calumniated by them.
Justice having been done, in one shape or other, to
Mr. Stephens, it will then remain for the patriotic
whigs to apply the same line and measure to the in-
cendiary harangues and treasonable advice of Mr.
O'Connell.

The whigs, however, will be in no haste, we fancy,
to discharge the latter act of duty to the public;
nay, they seem to be already ashamed of having taken
up something like a false position in regard to Mr.
Stephens—if, at least, we may judge of ministerial
feelings by the tone of the ministerial organ—the
Globe. That journal observes, last night :
" Whether sufficient care has been taken to obtain
legal evidence of the incendiary language reported
without contradiction as used by this man, we have
not materials, and do not undertake, to pronounce.
We hold, however, that the public authorities, in a civi-
lised country, have no choice, where evidence has been
obtained, as to proceedings in such cases. It is their
bounden duty to put down all incitements to outrage,
whether written or spoken. They have stretched their
allowance of ' demonstrations' of opinion to the utter.-
most limit. They must show an equal determination
to uphold law and preserve order. They must punish
(and, by punishing in one instance, prevent in others)
exhortations to resistance of law—assassin suggestions
against persons—incendiary menaces against property.
If they do not this, with what justice can they punish
the poor dupes of these firebrands ? With what jus-
tice—when the full persuasion of total impunity for
whatever advice or whatever actions phrensy may dic-
tate has been suffered, by their culpable negligence, to
diffuse itself through whole dishicts,—with what jus-
tice, we say, can the poor workpeople, who think in
herds,' as Detrosier said of them, be fired upon by
military or tried -by commissions, for acting in herds
also ! :i\To—it is the truest mercy to the many timely
to check the few, who have just sufficient talent and
education to be fiery declaimers, but not sufficient en-
lightenment or sufficient conscience to be rational
expositors to the poor of their rights, duties, or cir-
cumstances,—it is, we say, the tritest mercy to their
easily-misguided auditors, to stop such men at the first
moment they pass-33 such men never fail to pass—
the bounds of fair and legal discussion, and aim at sti-
mulating their assemblages, by the very mode of meet-
ing, and still more by the topics addressed to them, to
direct resistance and violation of law—and, by no
obscure intimations, to direct attacks on persons, and
destruction of property."
The Globe is a journal far too clever not to be aware
that all the 'propositions laid down in the passage
which we have quoted, involve a bitter condemnation
of the Whig government for having tolerated, and for
still tolerating, Mr. O'Connell .in his treasonable
movements against the integrity of the British empire,
and against the lives and properties of the whole
Anglo-protestant population of Ireland. Our minis-
terial contemporary does, indeed, subsequently con-
tend that Mr. O'Connell's recommendations have
merely pointed to "passive resistance against tithe."
We cannot, however, avoid thinking that the death's-
head and cross-bones emblems have little obvious
affinity with passive resistance in any shape; nor can
we understand, why a million or two of " fighting"
men should be enrolled as "precursors," merely to
give effect to doctrines of "moral force." If, besides,
it were, for the sake of argument, to be conceded to
the Globe, that Mr. O'Connell's recommendations have
"pointed" only to passive resistance, still we cannot
avoid knowing to what results those recommendations
have actually, and almost invariably, led. Murders,
burnings, wholesale destruction of Protestant life and
property:—these results have flowed from the passive
resistance counsels of Mr. O'Connell. No one, on
the contrary, pretends that the followers of Mr. Ste-
phens has ever embrued their hands in blood, or that
they have destroyed property in any shape. The
charge of burning Mr. Jowett's mill, which was for
some time directed against some unknown disciple
of Mr. Stephens, has been gainsaid by Mr. Jowett
himself;—whilst on the other hand, at the late dinner '
given by five hundred operatives to Messrs Stephens
and Oastler, Mr. Oastler boldly declared that the mill
in question was fired by some Whig emissary for the
special purpose of trumping up a charge against Mt.
Stephens.
Be these things, however, as they may, let the
Whigs, we repeat, proceed in the good work on which
they have entered. If Mr. Stephens can be proved to
be guilty of one tithe of the crimes which the Whigs
so freely lay to his charge, let him be punished as the
law may direct. Let, then, a similar opportunity be
afforded to Protestant Conservatives of proving, high
crimes and misdemeanors against Mr. O'Connell ; and
let the punishment in the event of conviction be regu-
lated by the same unflincing spirit of patriotism, which
has led to the persecution of Mr. Stephens.

Among the remains of Egyptian art which have been
banded down to the present day, many specimens of articles
cowered with gold leaf are found,