The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1841-01-15 00:00:00

materially affecting the revent

ial impetus to the foreign

cauntrT

In advancing these few su

that ours is not the source from whence they ought to

originate. The manufacturing interest, we may be told,
should be the first to speak out on matters which so
largely affect their immediate prosperity. We admit
that such ought to be the case, although we may re-
mark that Liverpool is also largely interested in any
question affecting the foreign trade of the country.
The towns of Manchester, Bolton, Preston, &c., should
undoubtedly take the lead in advocating, through their

representatives in parliament, these and similar mea-
sures of financial reform ; but the fact is undeniable,

that if even poi

sessed of the will

—if ready to lay aside

the dishonest outcry against the corn-laws, which a
factious liberalism holds out to the deluded people as
the universal panacea for all the evils which its own

imbecility has created,—the large manufacturitig towns
have no influence in the House of Commons. The race
of shallow.and impertinent gabblers, who presume to

represent the opinions and wishes of the manufacturing

interest

;,—the Philipses, the Gregs; the Ainsworths, t

hoc genus omne,—are perfect ciphers in St. Stepheies;
and if the model of a spinning jenny or a power-loom
could he placed in a conspicuous position in front of

the Speaker's chair, to remind the house tl

t the ma-

nufacturing and commercial interests of the country
require occasionally the notice and the aid -of the legis-
lature, we could well dispense with the whole brood of
them, for any benefit which their various constituen-

cies derive from their legislatorial wisdom.
We were told indeed the other dav that one of these
enlightened gentlemen—Mr. Mark Philips—had actu-
ally, on two different occasions, -during the ten years
for which he has represented•the borough of Man-
chester, done—what, reader '

Twice, this eminent

vender of tape and fringes had actually—placed a
notice of motion on the books to repeal the cotton

duty ! Actually written . six or eight lines, in the
orthodox form of a notice, and signed his name or his
mark at the bottom ; and as deliberately withdrawn
the same, as a matter of course, on receiving a minis

terra.'-rii-nt that the subject was inconvenient, accompa-
nied perhaps with an invitation to dine at Lansdowne
House, or the offer of a presentation at the next draw-
ing room. When the commercial interests of the
country are resigned to the guardianship of such legis-
lators—when this noodle race of statesmen are recog-
nised as the exclusive organs of the national industry,
we shall indeed have sorry hopes of witnessing much
change for the better in our commercial or financial
policy.
We shall return to this subject again, in order to no-

tice the operation of one class of duties in particular
which more immediately concerns our own commu-
nity. We allude to the stamp duties upon bills of lad-
ing and policies of marine insurance, which we believe
to press with very prejudicial effect upon our merchants
and shipownera; and we need scarcely remark upon
the importance, at the present moment, whilst menaced
with the prospect of
.a foreign war, of cultivating assi-
duously the interests of the latter class—the owners of
our commercial marine. Looking, as England must
look in every emergency, to her _navy for protection, a
wise and paternal government ought undoubtedly to
value and to study the prosperity of the merchant ser-
vice as the nursery of the seamen who man our fleets

in the day of peril ; and that prosperity, we trust, we
shall be able to show, on a future occasion, may be
materially advanced by a modification of tbe duties in