The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1841-08-10 00:00:00

is only an assumption—a mere _assertion of an atiii.chtn
v advocate, and something which approximati*:;Aittle
,arer to the " gist of the question" than the broad 9ropo-
:ion with which he has connected it ; that's all. The
oglish hand-loom weaver, observe, whO is to have "' two
ishels of Polish wheat, where he now gets only one
nglish," can obtain them only on the terms of " exchange ;"
it suppose the corn laws repealed, with whom is he to
ake the exchange ? Oh, the Polish serfs who grow this
leap corn will make the exchange with him ! The foreign

grower desires nothing so much as to encourage our
Factures; they are only longing to be permitted to land

,eir corn in our ports, in order—

-not to drain off our

specie ;—oh, no; but to have the extreme felicity of trans-
rerrin their custom from their own native manufacturers to

ose of England, of Bolton, Manchester, Stockport, and all
other great manufacturing towns ! Credat Judmus,,
There is much more excursiveness equal!),

non nos

.sive and satisfactory in our contemporary's remark,

twe cannot occupy space with its examination. We ofer
is one excerpt as a sample of the heap, and our readers may

:e of it for themselves. For our part, we by no means in-

tend to insinuate or to affirm that our contemporary's
rubbish is worse than the rubbish of other people who belong
to the same school ; but we would just beg our readers to
remark upon what wretched and unstable grounds the whole
party proceed, and how exactly the heat, and zeal, and noise
with which they usually pursue their objects, seem to be
proportioned to the want of clearness in their understandings,

and of all precision in their reasoning.
Our contemporary, after drawing a most mistaken inference
from some former remark of ours, and perverting our mean-
ing, asks if the " self-supporting principle has not failed,
because, during the last four years, we have annually im-
ported more than 2,000,000 quarters of foreign wheat ?
Although," he says, " our farmers, encouraged by monopoly
prices, have raised as much grain as they possibly could;
and although our corn merchants have imported large sup-
plies from abroad ; yet, in spite of all this, several millions

. .
of the population have been half starved on account of the
,learners of food and the consequent scarcity of employment.
Since such, then, are the results of that agricultural protec-
tion which he defends so strenuously, we cannot understand
shy he should speak of it as a self.supperting' system."
Begging our contemporary's pardon, the self-supporting
principle is not in the least affected by the main fact to which
ne alludes, namely, the importation of foreign cern in con-
sequence of unfavourable harvests at home. Does he quarrel

the circumstance that the protection of the farmer is

not carried higher than it is ? Self-support is the rule, but
unfavourable seasons cause a very just exception to, and
leviation from, it ; this is the farmer's loss, our loss, and
every body's loss ; but the misfortune is rendered as light as
possible by the operation of that sliding scale which lets in
the foreigner's corn when we stand in need of it. This is

no failure at all of our principle ; nay, it is a confirmation of
its excellence ; because, if it were not for the rule—the law
which gives the native farmer protection—the self-support
thus established as the ordinary regulation, we should very
likely look to foreigners in vain in bad seasons, or at least
tind it much less easy to meet our difficulties than we are able
to do under existing circumstances.

Our contemporary next resumes his favourite topic of Italy
and the Italians, and endeavours to prove, if we rightly un-
lerstand him, that the great complaint of that country is not
?opery, but an excessive attention to the cultivation of its
iroductions, and the absence of power-looms and cotton fac-
Now, we should only smile at such a paradox if it
were sported by any other than an advocate or a member of
the anti-corn law junto; but of such parties; this and other
such absurdities constitutes an important portion of their
stock in trade ; it is actually a discharge of their most heavy
artillery, and they expect it to do great damage. Our Jour-
nalist argues that because, in a dark age, the Lombard cities
obtained for themselves a comparative amount of indepen-
dence, and carried on au extensive trade, that therefore Po-
pery has nothing to do with their present degradation, and
that of all Italy. He should have carried his inquiry a little
further, and have asked whether the advancement was effected
in harmony and correspondence with the genius of Popery,
or in spite of, and in opposition to it ? But no ; an anti-corn
law advocate cannot be expected to be over perspicacious on
this point. It is the agriculturist, and not the Pope, of whom
he is in dread ; he thinks nothing of submitting to the " su-
preme jurisdiction of the Pope," as he delicately calls it ;
but the plough and oxen of the farmer, and the simple appa-
ratus of their protection, are a perpetual raw-head and bloody-
bones to his imagination. Oh lamb-like Pope! Oh most sa-
vage and truculent farmer !

But there is an inspiration in the cotton-mill which, we
own, we have never imbibed, and as there is said to be a
" pleasure in madness which none but madmen know," we
must leave our contemporary to speak under its power.
Without the high artificial heat of the mill, the smell of the
oil, the rattle of the looms, and the fuz, no man could pro-
perly mount the tripod, and declaim against the balmy air—
the vine-cladlills—the cloudless skies—and (oh tell it not
in Gath !) the rude out-door cultivation of sunny Italy.
These are the appliances to give wings to the poetry of cot-
ton. Let the agriculturist then beware, for the fire kindles,
and the bard, " rapt, inspired," will convert your agricultu-
ral paradise into a wilderness—Popery into an angel of light
and love—and the close factory, with all its infant slaves, and
the densely inhabited manufacturing town, with all its vice
and filth, into an earthly heaven. Happy are they whom the
gods have made poetical : for our part, we are so little liable
to these tricks of the imagination, that in a mill we see only
a mill, as in a sheep a sheep, or in any other matter-of-fact
object its like.