The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1852-06-08 00:00:00

TO CORRESPONDENTS

C- We shall be happy, at all times, to receive communications
on subjects of local or general interest ; and if our friends
will be good enough to authenticate the same by their signa-
tures, for our own satisfaction, we shall feel obliged.

Ribcrpoot tanbarb,

TUESDAY HORNING, JUNE 8, 1852.

WHAT IS TO BE THE POLICY OF .I\IR.
CARDWELL AND THE PEELITE PARTY?

THE honourable misrepresentative of Liverpool, Mr.
EDWARD CARDWELL, is to most men a political
enigma. To his nearest friends he is unintelligible,
if we may judge from their motley character; and
we very greatly mistake if he is not dangerous. He
is the chosen of the Irish Roman Catholics ; the
candidate for whom the " Catholic Defence Asso-
ciation" is prepared to do battle. He is the pet of
the Unitarian Whig-Radicals, the admired of the
democracy of Manchester, and is patronised by that
very crochetty body, the Liverpool National Con-
federation, whose leading members not very long
ago denounced him as a violator of his pledges, or
professions—for Mr. CARDWELL is as little to be
read straight forward as dreams, or the Delphic
Oracle. Greatest miracle of all ! though " Hiber-
nior Hibernicis," he hopes to be enabled to convince
the electors of Liverpool that he is an excellent Pro-
testant ! ! It is time, however, that the attempt

should be made to strip the cloak of mystery from
the shoulders of this human riddle ; and happily an
admirable article in this month's number of Black-
wood affords materials which will assist us con-
siderably in the effort.
Mr. CARrycvmLes past political history is tole-
rably well known. It has been that or a man
struggling for place and power, without having
encumbered himself with any definite principles.
He was a useful subordinate to Sir ROBERT PEEL ;
and, as we do not give him credit for the boldness

of setting up in business on his own account, we
are driven to regard him as an ally and follower of
the chief of the Peelite party—Sir JAMES GRA-.
HAM. His position and alliances in Liverpool fur-
nish a tolerably correct exponent of the policy of
the Ministry which—Lord JOHN RUSSELL and
the Whig family party being politically dead—would
most probably be formed in the event of the Earl of
DERBY being driven from the helm of state.
Our valued contemporary gives us a forcible
picture of the position of the PEELITE party after
the betrayal of their long-professed Conservative
principles had been consummated, and the further
isolation in which they were placed by the death of
their leader, Sir ROBERT PEEL. For a time, whilst
,endeavouring to constitute themselves a nucleus
around which to gather a•liberal Conservative party,
they endeavoured to win back the confidence of the
body of gentlemen with whom they for merly acted,
and maintained an occasional show of hostility to
Whig statesmanship. •l3ut we shall here quote from
our contemporary=:—
" At length came another sudden and great change
over the position and :prospects of parties, in the shape of
the Papal aggression, and its ridiculous• result, the Eccle-
siastical Titles Bill. ,On this occasion the little Peel
party thought proper to commit themselves, almost to a
man, to doggedly opposing the national feeling, faintly
professing to share the universal indignation, but osten-
tatiously adopting •a line of policy in entire unison with
the feelings and wishes of the Roman,Catliolic party l If
their counsels, immediately before the meeting of Parlia-
ment in the Session of 1851, bad been based upon the
expectation that the Liberal party at large would side
with them, they immediately found themselves totally
mistaken ; for Lord .John Russell was supported by not
only the great majority of his own professed adherents,
but by many of the Radical party, and also by the old
Conservative party, who found fault with Lord John
only because his legislation was miserably unequal to so
great an exigency, and would disappoint the country.

So far, then, they had committed a blunder; and
we well know how ingeniously one of their number,
.Mr. CARDWELL, has endeavoured to get out of its
consequences. They had made their bid for the sup-
port of the Roman Catholic party in Parliament
and in the country, whose aggressive assaults
against the-supremacy of the SON'EREIGN and our
Protestant ,institutions and Church they were
pledged to countenance ; and hence we find our
own member and candidate, 'Mr. CARDWELL, the
selected of the Irish Romanists and the Ribbonmen
of Liverpool. But this was not ground broad
enough to enable them to make a bid for political
power. The democratic Manchester party, headed
by Mr. COBDEN and Mr. BRIGHT, and the old
Radicals and Chartists, represented by Mr. HUME,
had been detached from the side of Lord JOHN
RUSSELL and his friends by the defeat gained over
them by that statesman in the :session of 1849,
when the motion for a large extension of the
suffrage was brought forward 1:T111r. HuasE, the
levelling character of which may 'be estimated by
.the fact that it was approved of by Mr. FEARGUS
O'CONNOR and the whole of the Chartists in the
.House of Commons. Those parties were to be
appeased, and an opportunity of doing so was
afforded by the introduction of the Militia Bill of
the present Government, in the opposition to which
:Mr. ,CARDWELL and his friends were found aiding
the obstructive efforts of the extreme Radicals and
the members of the Manchester school.
Mere, then, are the elements of a government to
which alone the Peelites can offer a consistent sup-
port-: the professors of extreme democratic views
on the one hand, and the active agents of the pro-
popish ,party—the nominees of the " Catholic De-
fence Society," and the Jesuit body—on the other,
both united in a bitter hatred to the tstabliehed
Church of England.' That we may not be mis-
taken as to the views of the latter—of Mr. .CARD-
WELL'S particular friends, whose support on a re-
cent occasion was openly tendered to him at the
Music Hall, on the ground of his non-opposition
to the papal aggression,—we shall quote here an. x.
tract from the electioneering address of a public
man, Mr. Frederic Lucas, proprietor of the Tablet.,
a Roman Catholic and ultra-montane organ, who
has been selected by the priests as the candidate
for the county of Meath. Mr. Lucas says :
" The whole iniquity, every shred and fragment of it,
proceeds from the ESTABLISHED CHURCH. Of that
institution, as it exists in England, I will say nothing ;
because, on the other side of the Channel, it has at least
some claims to the character of nationality, and to the
favour of the people among whom it rears its unmitred
front ! But in Ireland the case is different ; and as the
only remedy for the aggressions which have been already
perpetrated, and for those still worse which are threatened
against us, lies in the removal of that painted and gilded
rottenness which is nicknamed the Establishment, I
think it necessary just to say one word about it. The
formula that I should use would be, not that I would
oppose any Government which will not repeal the Eccle-
siastical Titles Bill, but that I would oppose every Govern-
ment which will not remove in this country the grievance
of the Established Church. which, not absolutely
put down its monopoly of thetecclesiastical revenues, and
lamnodael
.iolmthiseens land. Abate this one
o
standing
nthat arrogantiazdttot the
pigrievance—destroy this one wlslice—put down this one
monopoly—erase from the surface of this soil the odious
spectacle of a Catholic population lorded over by Pro-
testants parsons, and Lord Archbishops, and clerical
iustices and robbers, ,rho, under various denominations,
r un into their own den apart tic whole produce of a
till

orhe same kind and fall to the grownd,
t
national fund, which they acquired by plunder, an
maintain by the strong arm alone—undermine this one
ne2ntoarT,7oQuvs„garnclee
s,
smerak:rtict
slao
ntteeer a

rentage will be be buried in the wide-spread ruins. My
tion, therefore, is that for saving ourselves from the
by which we are at once assailed
d securing to ourselves and our pos-

Protestant
nn a thrnaf,

:reesion

,erfect e

before t

we must beg
ovolv of the Established Church