The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1840-08-14 00:00:00

Listen reader, and be amazed at the consummate
mpudence which could prompt even such a confirmed
ioodle as Lord Ebrington to utter the following stuff
:0 an assembly of rational beings at such a crisis as
,he present !

" Proud, indeed," he says, " is the spectacle which Ire-
land at this moment presents, in the tranquillity of the coun-
try, and the great diminution of crime, amidst much, I fear,
of privation and distress ; but prouder still may be the boast
of your great and populous city, that within her walls, and
by one of her citizens., was sown the first seeds of that great
social and moral improvement which has spread such incal-
culable blessings throughout every corner of this island."

Yes—this trashy mixture of rank falsehood and
sheer drivelling was actually uttered from the lips of
Lord Ebrington in reply to an address from the
patriots of Cork—nine-tenths of them repealers, and
one-half, sworn ribbonmen--no later than eight days
ago; and we might admire the power of stolid gravity
which could listen to it without fits of laughter, were
we not convinced that the hearers were prepared to
view the whole business of address and reply as an or-
dinary piece of acting on the part of his Excellency,
as it was undoubtedly on their own.
But Lord Ebrington was not sent to Cork for the
simple purpose of uttering rhodomontade himself, or
of enabling his admirers in that enlightened city to
proclaim to the world that the " great moral phenome-
non" which is called tranquillity in Ireland is exhibited
"from an anxious desire not to embarrass the action of
his Excellency's administration!" The Lord Lieute-
nant was required to throw his contribution of mischief
into the cauldron of agitation, in the r.hape of misre-
presentation, conveyed from vice-regal lips, of the
principles and objects of Lord Stanley's bill. We
quote the precious effusion ; and we ask how a noble-
man can possibly be degraded lower than to be the
utterer of such a paltry tissue of insolence, hypocrisy,
and abject crawling servility ? Here it is reader for
your edification.

Greatly, therefore, do I regret that, under such circum-
stances, you .should find, cause to complain of any attempt
'airing been made to curtail your liberties and impair your
Nothing of the kind, however, has been effected;
earnestly hope, that your continued good conduct, and
il attachment to our beloved Sovereign, will strengthen
hands of her Majesty's government, and enable them suc-
cessfully to show how just are the claims of your virtuous and
warm-hearted country to the confidence and affection of the
imperial parliament—to the fullest enjoyment of constitutional
equality with all other portions of the British realms, and to
every assimilation of laws and institutions which, by elevat-
ing the character and promoting the happiness of the people,
may cement the bonds of legislative union, and render Ire-
land at once the brightest gem in the imperial crown and the
strongest bulwark of the united empire."

franchise

Now what, we ask, must be the conclusion drawn
from the whole case. between the government of Ire-
land and the present movements of Daniel O'Connell ?
That truculent agitator is now confessedly engaged in
an endeavour to subvert the Protestant constitution of
Ireland, and to effect the dismemberment of the em-
pire—to do that very act which a few years ago drew
from the present Lord Lieutenant, in his place in the
House of Commons, the following declaration :—" I
am therefore .quite ready to join with my noble
friend (Lord Althorp) in saying, that, if driven
to the dreadful alternative of a civil war, or
the dismemberment of the empire, I SHOULD PREFER
THE FORMER AS THE LESS EVIL;" and yet the
noble lord is seen not only winking at the overt trea-
son—not only fondling and •caressing the traitors—
but actually prostituting the name and the character
of the Sovereign, in whose attributes he is clothed, by
becoming in his own person an itinerant agitator, and
throwing fresh fuel upon the smouldering embers of
rebellion. It is no longer possible to doubt the fact,
that Lord Ebrington and her Majesty's government are
irrevocably committed to repeal ! They dare not, for
their mercenary souls, take one step to arrest its pro-
gress; but, on the contrary, they are base enough to
endeavour, by flimsy artifice, by fraud and palpable
falsehood, to throw dust into the eyes of our Sove-
reign, and to hold back, so far as in them lies, from
her knowledge and the knowledge of the British peo-
ple, the existence and growth of a conspiracy, whose
full development will snatch a jewel from the crown,
and wrest a powerful limb from the body of the em-
pire. That they will long be allowed to continue in
their career of destruction we cannot believe; but, in
the meantime, we know and feel that their dishonest
and traitorous policy is preparing the way for a crisis
of fearful and desolating strife, from the bare contem-
plation of which every sincere lover of Ireland's wel-
fare must turn with a shudder of mingled compassion
and trembling.

The session of 1840 has at length drawn to a " most
lame and impotent conclusion." Her Majesty's inca-
pables, having been badgered and hunted from cover
to cover for six weary months, are at length released
from the daily and hourly fears of being run into and
worried ; and are doubtless at this present moment
licking their sore bones in their various burrows, whilst
their conservative tormentors are relaxing themselves
upon the moors, and gathering amongst their wild
heaths an accession of strength and healthy spirits for
another, and, it is to be hoped, a final contest. We
shall not at present aggravate the lacerated feelings of
the defeated and almost frantic Whigs, by alluding to
the various discomfitures and bitter mortifications which
they have had to endure; but we must enter our pro-
test against the miserably drawn up document in which
they have recorded their victories. It would be unrea-
sonable, perhaps, to expect much enlightenment upon
the subject of public affairs from a Queen's speech,
either at the commencement or the termination of a
session; hut we do think that in the present very satis-
factory state of things, both at home and abroad, a
little more detailed information upon two or three im-
portant questions might safely have been, ventured
upon.

With respect to our foreign embroilments especially
this information ought to have been furnished, when it
probability, six whole months
is considered that, in all
will elapse before the country can be gratified with one
of those lucid and convincing statements which the
Foreign Secretaw is so frequently in the habit of lay-
ing before the House of Commons and the public.
We have, however, one consolation for these omissions

'the agitator himself, startled at this bold language,
affects, in his speech at Galway, to repudiate the idea
of " separation"; but, in the very next sentence of
that speech, he proceeds to prove that Ireland is, from
her insular position, peculiarly able to assert and
maintain her independence as a separate nation. But
let us give the impostor's own words :

1 lam for the continuance of the connexion, even to the
death, if necessary—(cheers) ; but I declare that while I
shall never be an advocate for separation, I shall never relax
for one moment in my efforts for repeal. (Loud cheering.)
I have many instances to show, where those nations are only
separated from powerful neighbours by an imaginary line,
drawn, as if with a piece of chalk, upon a map—there is no
hour of the twenty-four in which those nations might not be
attacked upon every point of their frontiers, by troops poured
from the dominions of their powerful neighbours ; but here
we have a compact and sea-girt isle, assailable, it may be
on two or three points at once, not more—while its own
compactness renders the movements of its forces so easy,
that in a few hours troops could be marched from Galway to
Dublin, or thence to Galway, if either were attacked, which
would be sufficient to drive the enemy into the sea, if they
dared to make a descent upon our shores. (Hear, hear, and
loud cheering.) ! !

Whilst treason is thus rife around the seat of his
vice-regal government, does the representative of the
Sovereign hurry to repress the rising spirit of insubor-
dination, and to put down the agitation of a measure
the success of which he knows and has declared would
bring ruin upon the empire ? No ; his excellency has
a different part to play in the drama. England must
be kept amused whilst Ireland is being revolutionised.
A demonstration of peace and healthy feeling must be
made, to conceal the convulsed and angry spirit which
is working in the background. The ministry of Lord
Melbourne is on the brink of destruction, and clings
for support to the skirts of the traitor whom in its
better days it has denounced from the lips of the So-
vereign ; and the representative of royalty in Ireland,
although placed there to 4dminister the laws and de-
u7-* LI tipn, la reaucea, ny
hard necessity and the tyranny. of Daniel, to the mise-
rable conditiOn of a political showman—doomed to
perambulate from fair to fair, from city to city, utter-
ing whatever stilted trash he pleases in behalf of his
precious collection of incapables, and in praise of his
own incapable self, provided he does not by any un-
fortunate chance stumble upon a true description of
the said incapables, or of the country upon which they
are an infliction.