The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1839-05-21 00:00:00

the portrait is so very striking, and the colouring so
inimitable, that, for the instruction of our easy and
good-natured opponents, and for the amusement of our
fellow-townsmen, we shall insert it at length :
" The reference which you make to the municipal bill, and
to the satisfaction felt in the country with your reforms gene-
rally, leads me to make the last observation with which I
shall now trouble you. I beg of you not to believe that you
can safely trust to the communications of the new town-
councils, or the borough magistrates as the exponents of the
liberal party's feelings. They, I doubt not, are well satis-
fied. Those worshipful persons are not very difficult to
please, as long as the party they side with is in power—not
very hard to satisfy with reasons for the stand-still policy,
when urged by the dispensers of titles and patronage, aye,
and even the actual holders of high office. Nothing is so
gratifying to the civic mind as correspondence with men in
power. Nothing so perfectly suits the municipal taste as
being applied to for favours, forwarding the application to
exalted quarters, and being the channel of returning an ans-
wer, be it even a courteous refusal. The worthy alderman,
shining conspicuously among his fellow-citizens in the robes
of his high office, shines with a yet more resplendent glory,
when he is known to have the ear of a man in yet higher
office than his own. The worshipful the mayor who conde-
scendingly tells the tradesman, saluting him profoundly and
smilingly, ' Sir, sir, I am but a man,' adds to the length of
the bow and the width of the smile, if it is ascertained at the
past-office that he receives the frequent letters franked by
one who is not only a man but a minister. Rely on it ; but
rather advert to your experience of the last three psars, and
you will recollect that the desire of belonging to the party of
the government, and holding intercourse with its adminis-
trators, rules supreme in the bosom of many a corporator,
who, before 1836, was as sturdy in his political principles,
and as unbending in his public virtue, as Andrew Marvel
himself."

Really this is too bad ;—it was not needful to add
insult to injury ;—our friends (we have been told) know
what it is to have intimate communication with Lord
Brougham ;—and all the world knows how they cice-
roned his noble correspondent, "not only a man but a
minister," when he spent a day in Liverpool last au-
tumn. But this show-up is the unkindest cut we ever
remember to have seen, and will not (we trust) be for-
gotten by our liberal friends in Liverpool, when insidi-
ous prompting or their own evil genius shall again
tempt them to become the mouth-pieces of some
party-cry, exploded and disavowed by their more
knowing masters.

* We hope the slight liberties we have taken with this
passage will be candidly excused ; and if any erudite friend
shall object to our various readings, we beg respectfully to
submit that we have fallen into no false quantities, nor
coupled together heathen Greek and heroic Latin, nor (as we
humbly hope) fallen into any other very egregious or absurd
mistake. See lneid, vi. 855.

Since the whigs themselves have been driven from
the impudent fictions fulminated against the great con-
servative leader—and almost as hard is it to drive the
whigs from an useful fiction as from Downing-street
itself—we suppose we need not waste our 'readers' time
in any serious attempts at any further confutation.
There is an old proverb which says, " It's ill to tak'
breeks aff a Hielander," and it would be idle to waste
words in exposing a lie which already stands bare to the
winds of popular contempt. Our readers will bear us
witness that through both the Irish and the Colonial
crisis we never pressed for impatient counsels, or a
very forward warfare on the part of the conservatives.
We are quite satisfied with the manner in which things
are working, and the way in which thogame is played.
When.a Whig vacates a county, whether in the -north of
Scotland or the south of England, a conservative sup-
plies his place, by a majority which sets all future
opposition at
,defiance. When a radical town is
vacated in England—aye, and even a pocket bo-
rough in Ireland—the radical fights a close contest
with doubtful success. Thus is the march of events
proceeding. Eirery fresh measure brought into par-
liament excites new enmity against the whigs—every
discomfiture stirs up increased contempt. The rising
tide of conservatism is constantly evincing its silent
progress, as shoal after shoal of radicalism is disap-
pearing: We are satisfied to wait till we can take it at
" the flood, when it leads to fortune." And we declare,
therefore, most consistently as well as most unfeign-
edly, our heartfelt satisfaction in this last turn of the
liberal tables. Driven from the lie they coined, by
which they have climbed into office, and which now
(i.e., not the office, but the lie) they have been com-
pelled unequivocally to abandon, they have exhibited
the true instincts of genuine whiggery yet more clearly

to the world " than before. What a hullabaloo they
raised throughout the land when King William ex-
pressed his preference for a conservative cabinet!
What an outcry would they have raised now, if it had
accidentally happened that the House of Lords preferred
a whig government—that the House of Commons had
virtually and confessedly defeated a tory cabinet,—but
that the Sovereign, in the exercise of her personal pre-
ferences, had discarded the liberals and retained the
tories ! ! What an owls' chorus should we not have
been doomed to hear ! The universal paean of dissent-
ing clamour would have been reverberated from county
to county, and scarcely have died away in the moun-
tains of Cornwall and the northernmost fastnesses of
Scotland. And then .if three tory ladies had been at
the bottom of it all, and caused this great perplexity !
They would have had .antibedchamber meetings,—
Hampdens at. Birmingham and Marvels at Leeds,
pikes-men and dark-night-Men in the. populous dis-
tricts, would have swelled the cry of popular liberties
and public principle, raised by lordlings in more
courtly quarters, and nicely managed and directed by
liberal Scipiones Africani in their several stations. No
man who remembers the twelve infamous (we beg to
correct Mr. Thomas Macaulay's version) days of May,
1832, can doubt that our youthful Sovereign would
have been exposed to all the personal intemperance of
liberal disloyalty on the hustings, while the absurdity
of monarchical institutions would have been gravely
discussed and denounced in the liberal press. Imagine
a youthful lady on the throne, and three tory confi-
dantes in the bedchamber endeavouring to carry on
the government against the houses of parliament and
the deliberately expressed opinion of the English peo-
ple ! It is not possible to imagine a conservative base
enough to permit his wife or daughter to hazard the
dangerous experiment ; and more, it is not possible to
conceive an Englishman, of English principle, suffer-
ing his wife to embarrass a service from which he had
been himself excluded. No English gentleman, no
English tradesman, no artizan, would act so ignomi-
niously. Well might Sir Robert Peel, with the Red
Book in his hand, take it for granted that these bed-
chamber politicians would have saved him all annoy-
ance by resigning. Even he did not know the whigs,
as all England knows them now. There is a day of
retribution : there will sooner or later be an appeal to
the people, and then these scores will be paid off with
interest. Meanwhile the Hume-ane Society at the
Reform Club has succeeded in restoring the su#pended
animation of their darling cabinet, and the exertions
of our friend " the Bear" have been successful for the
nonce. "It 's Lang ere the de'il die," and crimes that
would sink a better ministry are forgotten in the mul-
tiplicity of whig enormities. Lord Melbourne took
advantage of the " misunderstanding" not because it
was necessary to stand by his Sovereign, if this had
been all, it would have been a far simpler method to
have explained the misunderstanding, and set her Ma-
jesty right with Peel,—but because negotiations had
been opened in the meanwhile with the discontented
radicals, and those new terms of accommodation, which
we prognosticated from the first, had been proposed.
To the rumours which have been and are afloat, we
do not attach by any means implicit credit; and we
forbear to impose upon our readers statements which
have no more authentic foundation than mere rumour.
We may say, however, that the terms at first proposed,
viz. the ratepaying clauses repealed, and the penny
postage established, (which last, by the way, no con-
servative has ever opposed,) are far too narrow to con-
ciliate the griping philosophers. Even if Lord John
Russell be drummed out of the cabinet, and Rice.fand
Hobhouse be " kicked up stairs" and got rid 4f with
peerages, and thus the ballot be made an open ques-
t tion, we suspect all will not yet work smooth with the
lower radicals, while we are' sure that a number of
their more respectable adherents, sufficient to counter-
poise the radical accession, will immediately take up
their natural position behind the great conservative
leader. And to.talk of Lord Morpeth as leader of the
House of Comthons is sheer absurdity, paralleled only
by ,Esop's donkey, that aped the evolutions of the
dancing pnodle.

'T'hen let us sing " Long live the Queen !"
And Morpeth, long live he !
,A,l4shpuld he in the lead be sect,
Slav I lxeUwe to Fee !