The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1839-11-12 00:00:00

CONTEMPORARY PRESS.

RURAL POLICE.
(Prom the Preston Pilot.)
The reader will find in our present paper an account
of the Koccedings at the adjourned Annual Session,
held at the. Court-house on Wednesday last, and he
must consider them of most interesting nature.
The appointment of a constabulary force of 500 men,
at a cost of more than £30,000 a-year, cannot fail to
be a most astounding announcement to every person in
the county, but especially to persons in the rural dis-
tricts, whose property must of necessity bear a large
proportion of the tax that will be required, and for
whom tha system, shuffle its distributive qualities as
you may, will afford little protection. There is another
objection, however, to the measure, and that is, the
certainty of its superseding the present most respected
body of county. magistrates. For as sure as the con-
stabulary force is formed, so surely will its control be
but for a short period nominally under the control of
the county magistracy. The next step (and the tran-
sition is really clearly so easy a one, that we wonder the
magistracy have not seen it and guarded against it) the
next move in the game of despotism that will be played
in the counties of England, will be the substitution of
a race of stipendiaries, after the Irish fashion, and the
county magistrate who shall then be bold and honest
enough to say an unpleasant thing (hear the toast of
the " Battle of the Diamond," given in his own house)
against the government in power, will as surely be sent
to the right about as was Colonel Verner and other
spirited and independent mogistrates in Ireland. We
think the county of Lancaster at large will not be
found to agree in the conduct of the magistracy, in
surrendering its government to hirelings, we care not
whether they are called stipendiary magistrates, chief
constables, superintendents, or by any other name.
And we further say, that if till' county will not guaran-
tee its own peace and security by its own unbought
exertions, the puny efforts of a hired force of 500 men
will be found most miserably inadequate.

lIFVona the Preston Chronicle.)
At the'magistrates' meeting, on Wednesday, it was,
as our readers will perceive, fully settled that we are to
have a rural constabulary, or, to speak more correctly,
a semi-military surveillance over this county. The
state of the times is certainly an excuse for almost any
measure of police stringency,—but we are not aware of
anything so desperate in the condition of society as to
justify, much less call for, this most expensive, rigor-
ous, and obnoxious espionage arrangement. We have
not, at present, the opportunity of fully entering into
the subject, nor indeed is there anything to invite our
strictures against the infliction, feeling, as we do, that
remedy 18 hopeless ; for after the almost unanimous
feeling manifested by sixty-two county magistrates, on
Wednesday, it ought rather, perhaps, to be our hum-
ble solicitude to reconcile ourselves, and bend submis-
sively to the infliction, than to recollect that we are
Englishmen, and, at the resistless bidding of such a
recollection, struggle sternly against it. It was pain-
ful to hear some of the magistrates, who ought to
know better; applauding broadly, and without qualifi-
cation, the. principle of concentration,—the principle
upon which this rural soldiery experiment is based.
Alas ! these '2 great unpaid" perhaps never knew, or,
peradventure, have forgot, that while dispersion of
power is another name foF freedom, concentration is
another name for tyranny.

SUSPENSION OF PAYMENTS BY THE
UNITED STATES BANK.
(From the Morning Herald.)
The United States Bank has suspended cash pay-
ments ; and those stupid capitalists who were stupid
enough to buy up the rotten " securities" with which
the emissaries of Mr. Nicholas Biddle deluged our
money market two years and a l.alf ago, will have lei-
sure to repent pf their folly.
We have now, within the brief period of three years,
received two somewhat severe commentaries on the
value of our boasted foreign trade. In the beginning
of 1837 all the banks of the United States suspended
payment. Many of our leading merchants were, in
consequence, ruined; and Great Britain, besides the
injury consequent on the stagnation of trade, and on
the privation of employment to large bodies of work-
people, lost ultimately several millions sterling.
True, there was, after a long interval, a " settlement"
of the debt—but a settlement after what fashion ? The
miserable dependance of our cotton manufacturers on
the cotton growers of America compelled them, after
the failure of our American debtors, to buy American
produce as before ; but honest Mr, Biddle and his
allies determined, after their insolvency, to turn their
" vice to commodity." They issued, accordingly, im-
mense masses of paper money to the holders of cot-
ton—forced up prices to an unnatural height—and paid
their debt to England in a manner highly satisfactory
and profitable to themselves !
The United States of America creates three-fourths
of that demand on which our foreign trade is based ;
and our foreign trade has, for more than twenty years,
pToved a source of daily-increasing loss to England.
Yet our foreign trade is all-important in the eyes of
our rulers. Compared with our foreign trade, what
rare our free-trade " philosophers" for home trade, or
for the trade with our colonies ? To foreign trade
everything is sacrificed. We beat down the value of
native industry to the point which enables us to under-
sell foreign manufacturers in foreign markets ; we im-
pert-oriel" the consumers of the produce of the British
soil, in order to substitute for them far less profitable
foreign customers : and when we have, at length, se-
cured these customers, we are far (as the history of our
recent dealings with the United States proves) from
having secured their money. We have, in truth, lost,
by our foreign trade, a mass of wealth, which, had it
been ditiqued throughout England, in the form of in-
creased wages, would have rendered chartist insurrec-
tions impossible, while it would have preserved our
manufacturing and commercial systems from the gamb-
ling character which now attaches to them.
Will our rulers never learn, until 'it shall be too late,
that no trade may vie in importance, and in profitable-
ness, with home trade ? Will they never learn, that the
glorious colonies of England contain within themselves
the means of creating markets for the produce of
Englisk industry, ten thousand times more valuable
than all the foreign markets in the world ? Home
trade mid colonial trade, unlike our foreign trade, are
liable to no disastrous reverses. Home trade and co-
lonial trade neither convert our merchants into despe-
rate gamblers, nor our labourers into degraded paupers.
Home trade and colonial trade fill the cottages of the
poor with plenty—impart dignity and security to the
condition of our traders—and diffuse wealth, and its
attendant ble”,ings, through all orders of society. Fo-
reign trade never can effect these great results. The
true functions of foreign trade resolve themselves into
the exchange of one nation's superfluities against the
everiluities of other nations. When, however, a na-
tion, the English, is foolish enough to render itself
dependent on such a trade—when a great nation per-
mits prices and wages at home to be regulated by the
prices and wages which obtain in poorer foreign mar-
keti—then may the rulers of such a nation be justly
described as men afflicted with judicial blindness !

`WHIG TRlCaelt Y.— Quack Bowring, who has been abroad
at the country's expense, is to attend the Manchester Cham-
ber of Commerce (another name merely for the anti-corn law
league), by permission of ministers, to endeavour to make
out a case against agricultural protection, from the informa-
tion which he has acquired in Germany.
LOAD MELBOURNE AND THE COLLEGE FOR CIVIL
ENOINIZR4.—A few days before the council of this new
establishment printed their prospectus adeputation waited on
the Premier to request her Majesty's name as patroness. He
received them with politeness, and promised to submit the
prospectus to her Majesty, and doubted not of her appro-
ation to so useful a society. The same deputation waited
again on his lordship forhis answer, when he informed them
coldly, that having perused their prospectus, he considered
it as too restricted in its nature, and could not recom-
mend it to her Majesty's patronage. The words " this.
college is based upon the principles of the Established
Church," iu the first regulation, was the choke-pear that the
Liberal Premier could not swallow, although followed by
" but such pupils as are of a different religous persuasion will
be permitted to have free communication with their pastors,
and to attend their respective places of Divine worship."
His Grace the Duke of Buecleuch, the president of the col-
lege, has given £lOO towards the out-fit, and other friends of
the institution have given liberal presents of books, models,
&c. The council have taken Gordon-house, Kentish-town,
a large mansion, with extensive grounds, to begin with, and
purpose opening after the Christmas recess.—Correapond-
Irßef qf th. Timm.