The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1841-09-24 00:00:00

THE LIVERPOOL TIMES AND LORD SANDON

Our contemporary, the Liverpool Times, appears bent
upon annihilating our noble representative Lord Sandon, a
feat, for the performance of which we doubt not that the
gentleman of the anti-corn-law leaugue would hold him in
honoured remembrance. His lordship is afflicted, it seems.
with a strange and most inconvenient habit of uttering truths,
and, what is more, facts, in opposition to the vapid fictions
and impertinence which compose the staple of anti-corn-law
diatribes ; and the public, with a perverseness which is ex-
traordinary, has manifested a' disposition to place at least as
much reliance upon his lordship's facts as upon the mere
assertions of the whole tribe of free traders, even although
the question in dispute may be one of a commercial nature.

Ott 4et+efl* :6:"Htt oefTuions the raetp in qtiestion have broken

try unseasonably upon the state of delusion into which agi..
ation, and the constant iteration of the monosyllable

Corn," was fast hurrying the public mind ; and as a very
iatural consequence, his lordship has become, in the eyes of
:he:unprincipled marauders who seek to abuse the nation's
lonfidence, an object of hitter and unrelenting hatred.

We have reason to know that the few words uttered by his
lordship on Friday night, in the House of Commons, were
more than ordinarily embarrassing to the party of which the
loquent Mr. Cobden is the head, and of which our contem-
porary seems disposed to become the organ. It is a notori-
ous fact, of which his lordship reminded the house, that
overproduction is the cause to which, in private, the ma-
nufacturers of Lancashire attribute the greatest portion of
their present embarrassments, whilst in public they attribute
the whole of them to the operation of the corn-laws ;" and it
must have been galling enough to the actors in parliament
upon the occasion in question, and when in the very midst
of their pathetic, to have their masks removed, their stage
dresses stripped off, and to be exhibited " in puns naturali-
bus" to the gaze of a discerning people. Lord Sandon com-
mitted this piece of cruelty, and for so doing he is visited
with the wrath of the Liverpool Times, and is entitled to
the thanks, and will receive them too, of the bulk of his

constituents.
Though angry, however, and well inclined to throw dirt
upon the well-earned reputation of Lord Sandon, our con-
temporary is scarcely warranted in misrepresenting his lord-
ship by putting assertions into his mouth which he never, we
dare say, dreamt of uttering. His lordship never attributed

the embarrassments of the manufacturing interests of the
whole kingdom to the misconduct of the "Lancashire ma-
nufacturers." He never attributed the whole of that em-
barrassment to " overproduction" alone. On the contrary,
his lordship has always maintained that it could he attributed
to no one cause as the free traders would have us believe ;
but that it is the result of a variety of concurrent causes,
amongst which the madness—the " sacra auri fames"—of
the manufacturing interest itself is the principal, and amongst
which he does not account the operation of the corn-laws
at all.

Our contemporary, on the contra►y, indulges us with a
long string of evils which he attributes to the operation of
the corn-laws, primarily, acting, however, through the de-
ranged state of the currency. The present condition of the
manufacturing interests throughout Great Britain, he main-
tains, has three years been coming upon them, and is the
result of three successive bad harvests, accompanied by large
importations of Foreign corn, paid for in gold. We are far
from underrating the pressure upon our commerce which has
bees► the result of the large importations of Foreign corn
which have unfortunately been required by the country du-
ring the past three years. The necessity to purchase Foreign
corn has drained us of our gold ; it has decreased the con-
sumption of our goods in the home market; and has not in-
creased the inclination of the Foreign corn grower to pur-
chase from us. And what is more, we defy our contempo-
rary, or any other anti-corn-law advocate, to show satisfac-
torily that the importation of Foreign corn, under any system
of corn-laws, will ever be attended by any other results. To
the bad harvests of the past three years we ourselves are
quite prepared to attribute a portion of our commercial dis-
tress ; but we must protest that bad harvests and the corn-
laws are not synonymous terms.

But has our contemporary vindicated the conduct of the
manufacturing body from the imputation of misconduct or
want of prudence, charged upon them by Lord Sandon'
Not at all ; but, if possible, he has even made it stand out
in more prominent colours. For three years the elements of
distress have been gathering over their heads. For three
years the crisis which we now feel has been sensibly approach-
ing. And what, we ask, have been the precautions taken to
ward off its disastrous effects ? Has production been de-
creased during those three years or any of them ? Has the
manufacturer exercised greater discretion in his credits or
his investments ? Have the joint stock banks prepared them-
selves to meet the coming storm ? Has the private trader
drawn his capital within an available reach for his threatened
emergencies? Nothing of this kind has been done. No
precautions of any description have been adopted. Produc-
tion has gone on, and in 1840 even surpassed that of all
former years ; and we are now experiencing the result of this
mingled avarice, blindness, and folly, and not, most as-
suredly, of the corn-laws or any other laws.
We suspect that our contemporary, notwithstanding his
asseverations, is a little conscious of the truth of Lord'San-
don's position, from his anxiety to separate the case of the
woollen and other manufacturers from that of the gentlemen
of Lancashire. These traders at least, he urges, have not
been over-producing. Possibly it may be so ; but is it
indispensible, for all that, that the corn-laws are in fault ?
We can ourselves discover many fertile causes of the distress
which these trades are enduring, very remote indeed from
the cause which our contemporary would have us attribute
it to. The three deficient harvests of which our contempo-
rary speaks may furnish one very prominent cause. The
stoppage of various foreign markets by whig ministerial
blundering, another. But more than all, perhaps, it may be
traced to the revulsion caused by over-trading in one branch
of commerce, extending through the entire community•
Our whole commercial fabric has received a shock, in which
the most unoffending timbers must submit to partake.
Our contemporary winds up his most inconsequencial
article, in which we must confess that the " willingness to
strike" is displayed out of all proportion to the " ability to
wound," by imputing to Lord Sandon the intention of in-
sulting the manufacturing interest by attacking the personal
character of its members. We cannot ourselves discover
that anything at all resembling such an attack has ever fallen
from his lordship's lips. But would it be unreasonable, we
ask, if, some day or other, these gentlemen should provoke
retaliatory language ? Their orators and organs are not
usually very refined in their use of epithets or assertions, or
very scrupulous against whom they are directed ; and had
even Lord Sandon, on Friday, been more severe in manner
or in language than he really was, we could scarcely blame
him, although we might be sorry to see him or any gentleman
stoop from his position to measure .scurrilities with such an
opponent as Mr. Richard Cobden.