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Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1841-05-04 00:00:00

apparent

and the debate accordingly partook more of the na-
ture of explanations of the views by which the contending
parties had been actuated--intermingled by the Ministerialists
with splenetic personalities—than of a discussion of the real
merits of the question before the house. Lord Morpeth, in
his peculiarly sublime manner, expressed his sorrow at ob-
serving that the right hon. baronet, the member for Tam-
worth, " had been compelled to throw himself into the head-
long and impetuous career" of Lord Stanley—a course which
before long he feared he would have " bitter reasons to re-
gret ;" although what the nature of these reasons might be
he was not kind enough to disclose. The noble lord, how-
ever, would evidently have consulted his own ease better by
refraining from an attack—even by a side-wind—upon an
antagonist so prompt with his weapons as Lord Stanley,
who in a reply of infinite power made complete mincemeat of
the noble secretary and his bill at the same time, announcing
boldly and unreservedly that, in the vote which he was about
to give, his object was to get rid of it altogether !
After several vain attempts to prolong the discussion, by
Mr. Hume and others, and the administration of a little of
what Mr. Sam Slick would term " soft sawder" to her Ma-
linisters by Mr. Daniel O'Connell (on behalf of the
people of Ireland), for their good intentions—(a commodity
with which we are told that a certain place is "paved with,"
and which may possibly constitute the floor of that " slough
of despond" which. Ministers are all but in at the present
moment)—the house divided, and the Ministry were defeated
by a majority of eleven !
The scene presented upon the opening of the gallery was
of the most animated description, and, like a debutant at
Tyburn tree, or in the stocks, Lord John Russell found him-
self " the observed of all observers"—not much perhaps to
his inward gratification, vain and inflated as most undoubt-
edly he is. After a whole heap of regrets—a profession of
utter inability to comprehend what his opponents would be
at, and (strangest of all!) an earnest wish to know what Sir
Robert Peel would advise him to do under the circumstances,
his lordship concluded a flighty and at the same time feeble
speech, by moving " that the chairman do leave the chair,"
—a suggestion which Sir Robert Peel in a speech charac-
terized by great power and most happy effect heartily con-
curred in. The right hon. baronet repudiated in emphatic
terms the imagination thrown out by Lord Morpeth, that he
was under the coercion of the noble member for North Lan-
cashire ; and compared, in terms which called forth roars of
laughter from the house, the " perfect cordiality" existing
amongst the conservative party with the distracted condition
and divided affections manifested amongst Lord John's sup-
The house then adjourned at a little past nine.

jesty's

porters
But come we now to

"The last scene of all,
Which crowns this strange eventful—history,"
the poet has it, but " farce" would be the more appropriate
term. Again the house was crowded at an early hour ; and

now let me direct the attention of the conservative merchan,

of Liverpool to the working of what I observe Mr. Willia

Rathbone called the " TRAP" set for them, upon the occa•

sion of a late public meeting held in your town. Lord San
don presented a petition from 600 and odd merchants, bank=
&c., of the town of Liverpool, " praying for a revision of of

commercial tariff." Instanter Mr. Wm. Evart presented

petition signed by 53,000 ! ! inhabitants of the borough of
Liverpool,—(l really was not aware you had that number 01

male adults in all your population)—praying for a total re-
peal of the corn-laws ; Mr. Mark Philips presented a similar
petition from Manchester, and then—the trap fell, and Lord
John Russell announced that on the 31st of May the minis-
try would bring on the question of the corn-laws as a cabinet
question, "upon which ministers were undivided in opinion" I
I will not comment upon the position of the " trapped" con-
servatives of Liverpool in this little scene ; but merely're-
mark that without a strong protest they stand committed—
in the eyes of the public at least—not only to the budget, as
subsequently introduced, but also to Lord John's corn-law
measure whatever it may be.
It is utterly impossible for me to convey to you even the
slightest idea of the sensation created by Lord John Russell's
notice. The radical section—the anti-corn-law portion—of
his lordship's supporters were in the " seventh heaven," and
I verily thought would have shouted for a month. There
were, however, a few of the " liberal" landed gentry upon
the ministerial benches who were not disposed to be so joy-
ous upon the occasion, whilst the great body of the conserva-
tive party stood perfectly aghast at this frantic effort of their
beaten opponent, to fire the powder-magazine and blow up
the ship, rather than strike his colours. Their alarm how-
ever was a little abated by the discovery that the day, upon
which his lordshlp in his haste had fixed—the 31st of May—
was actually a holiday,—was Whit-Monday ! The noble
lord, however, who had not had time apparently since the

night before, when this desperate step was resolved upon, t 0
look at the calendar, intimated that if the Monday he had
fixed upon was Whit-Monday, he would put off his motion
until the Monday after, or some other convenient day ; and
the excitement having a little subsided, the Chancellor of the
Exchequer proceeded to bring in "what he called a budget!

Of the delectable scheme introduced by the chancellor I
need not attempt any description, for, in reality, neither the

manner nor the matter of the right honourable gentleman
were very lucid. Its main features, however, are a reduction
of the duties upon slave-grown sugars—let the abolitionists
of slavery in our colonies bear this in mind—from 635. to 365.
per cwt., and a reduction of the duty upon Baltic timber
from 555. to 505., with an increase of that upon Canadian

timber from 10s. to 20s. per load. The decrease in question
upon Baltic timber may be something very like the kind of
modification of the tariff proposed at the late meeting by the
" men of all parties" in Liverpool ; but I must confess I
cannot see how the mercantile or the shipping interest can
be benefitted—putting our colonists out of the question alto-
gether—by doubling the present duty upon colonial timber.

That, however, is not my affair.
The debate which followed was of a desultory character,
and in fact necessarily so. The Chancellor of the Exche-
quer had given only a mere outline of his plan—his estimates
of the revenue which it would produce, but not a syllable to
shew upon what data those estimates had been prepared. Mr.
Goulburn, indeed, endeavoured to grapple with what he could
find of detail, and went into a statement, (which ought to be
placarded throughout every whig-radieal borough in the king-
dom,) of the financial doings of Lord Melbourne's ministry,
since their accession to office with a SURPLUS of HALF A
MILLION: until the present hour, when they have contrived
with a revenue which has increased upwards of two millions
annually to accumulate a deficiency, by increasing expendi-
ture, which amounts now to SEVEN MILLIONS AND A HALF
Mr. W. E. Gladstone, by a few queries addressed to the
Chancellor of the Exchequer, which that eminent functionary
was at a loss to reply to effectually, convinced the house that
the whole affair, as to the sugar duties at least, was a loose
experiment. Lord Sandon, Lord Francis Egerton, and other
honourable members pressed for some definite notion of the
ministerial intentions with respect to the corn-law ; but in
vain. All that the world knows with respect to the probable
working of the financial scheme, and the nature and extent
of the ministerial attack upon the agriculture of the country,
is confined to this. Some claptrap proposition must be got
up to form an electioneering topic ; and we shall know more
of the chancellor's details andidata—when he has learnt more
himself—and of Lord John's corn-law bill, when he knows
the precise amount of fixed duty which will, by ensuring its
rejection, snake another appropriation clause of it

OUR PORTRAIT GALLERY.—No. VI

THOMAS BLACKBURN, ESQ

Behold, reader, in the disciple of Esculapius whom we

now present to your notice, the great apostle of that ‘ libe-
ral" and " enlightened" system of education which has
found favour in the eyes of the " liberal" and " enlightened"
portion of our Town Council—a system which we will not
embroil ourselves by describing further than as one by which
little boys and girls can be made into good readers, good
writers, good spellers, and even good philosophers, without

the odious necessity of being made, at the same time, good
Christians. We are very cautious, it will be observed, in
our description ; for perhaps, were we to express our candid
opinion of the system in question, we might be set down as
being ernbued with " narrow sectarian views" and " old-
world prejudices" upon the subject of religion, which would
utterly destroy our reputation with the philosophic portion
of the community. In this character alone—as the " Mag-

nus Apollo" of our Corporation Schools—is the worthy
doctor presentable amongst the illustrious occupants of Our
Gallery ; for, in all other respects, we can only class him
with that ordinary race who, we are told, are to be found

" in every country town,
Professing openly with death to wrestle,

Armed with a mortar and a pestle."

In this estimate of the character of our " Bolus,
borne out by the opinions of the burgesses of Lime-street
Ward, who in November last selected the education-doctor
as a companion 'picture for the ex-quaker ex-member for
Pitt-street; and never did two cherries grow upon the same
bough, two sparrows sit upon the same housetop, two geese
sit upon one leg in the same gutter, more worthy to be asso-
ciated together " in aternv,rn," to be framed and glazed and
hung up " cheek by jowl," than these Siamese twain—this
sweet brace of superlative humbugs. The majority of the
council, however, judged differently ; and accordingly alder-
manic honours have been heaped upon the man of pills and
potions, whilst " sweet William " is left to " waste his
sweetness on the desert air." The doctor still presides over
parsing and prosody, writing and arithmetic, cross-stitch,
seaming, and hemming ; whilst the discomfited Socinian is
fain to hide his diminished head under the wing of John

we are

Rosson, and to court the sweet airs which distil from his
associate brood of repealers for his daily meal of popular

'plause

In person Doctor Blackburn is not distinguished by any
superlative graces or comeliness. He has a hard, dry, utili-
tarian face, and, as a Scotchman would phrase it, limbs " in
conform." Habit him in the garb of a Saxon " navigator"
not one cf that fraternity which " goes down to the sea in
but of that coarser race of human beings who

rge ships

;o up sell

, sink wells, form railway embankments, or dig

drains ;—place a pickaxe or a shovel in his hands, and forth-
with all the outward indications of the man of education and
intellect would be lost. You might then aptly apply to him
the description given by William Wordsworth of his pedlar,
Peter Bell :

" There was a hardness in his look,
There was a hardness in his eye,—
As if from setting of his face
Against the wind and sky."
Neither can the attributes of grace or elegance be fairly
applied to the manner of the doctor, as a writer or a speaker.
From a man, in fact, of whose system the essential charac-
teristic is that it flings overboard all the finer feelings of the
human heart—that it deliberately separates itself from reli-

gion, as an essential principle in the constitution of society,
and adheres solely to the assertion of a cold utilitarian theory
which makes the realisation of earthly advantages a primary
)bject, whilst the achievement of eternal happiness is but of
secondary or subsidiary importance,—it would be vain to
ook for either lofty sentiment or refined and graceful lan-
Not a trace of imagination or of feeling—not one
entence addressed to the fancy or the heart—can be found,
ye venture to say, in any written production of Doctor
31ackburn ; and in the few oral addresses which we have
ieard him deliver, we cannot remember that one sentiment
ever issued from his lips which might not have been uttered
by an automaton. In the very " whirlwind of his fury,"
his manner never struck us with any other idea than that, so
happily depicted on one occasion by the Rev. Hugh M'Neile,
of a man " pounding his adversary's arguments in a mortar."
Such as he is, however, and although, in our humble opi-
nion, far from a favourable specimen of humanity, the doctor
appears, nevertheless, to be a very great man in the estima-
tion of his party; and, with all due deference to the profes-
sion to which he belongs, we never knew a medical pretender
to " superior lights," thoroughly embued, at the same time,
with the doctrines of " modern liberalism," who was not a
useful man in the eyes of his party, because a ready tool,
possessed of a just admixture of the qualities of the M'Syco-
pbant tribe, with the obduracy of heart and intellect peculiar
to the Malthusian philosopher. Of all pestilent quacks, we
fervently pray to be preserved from the medico-political
quack, who, forsaking his lancet and his gallipots, takes to
bleeding and physicking the body politic. We have no great
predilection for either drastic or purgative, bloodletting or
blistering, as applied to our own proper corpus ; we love nei-
ther splinters nor bandages, infusions nor transfusion; and

we see no pressing reason why one of the tribe who practise
these useful arts, or perform these salutary operations upon
diseased humanity, should be let loose to practise upon the
social machine. That they are very efficient practitioners
we have no doubt—where some principle obnoxious to libe-
ralism is to be eradicated. Of this, indeed, we have had
ample experience in the education-practice of the learned
doctor. But we once remember to have heard one of the
profession speak of " a beautiful ulcer ;" and however bene-
ficial the production of such an interesting phenomenon may
be to the human frame, we have no wish to see either ulcers,
in the shape of Corporation Schools, wens in the form of
Union Workhouses, blisters in the form of O'Connellite agi-
tation, or depletion in the form of free-trade and anti-corn
law nostrums, applied by political doctors to the body politic
of Great Britain. Entertaining such a feeling, we certainly
do not begrudge the whig party the possession of their medi-
cal alderman ; but, on the contrary, we do hope most fer-
vently that the time is not far distant when his political prac-
tice will be confined to a narrower sphere, and be will have
sufficient exercise for his gallipots in providing the necessary
emolients, to salve over the wounded vanity of his discom-
fited and discarded fellow-quacks in office.
The political views of the doctor are those of the thorough
whig hack, and his philosophy is of the Scotch school. From
the heart and the head of such a man might be supposed to
emanate the harsher features of the new poor law. In such
a man We workhouse test, the separation of husband and
wife, of parent and, child, the limitation of diet to that pre-
cise point at which the satisfaction of the bodily craving ends,
and starvation commences, the contract for cheap physic,
and, last scene of all, the felon burial and the unconsecrated
grave, would find an advocate, who, whilst thus deliberately
resigning the material frame to destruction—whilst thus de-
priving a human being of the privilege of breathing for the
few last hours of his pilgrimage the free air of heaven—would
stickle for the preservation of his rights of conscience, and
esteem it an act of hardship that his last prayer should be
poured out in the presence of the Established Church. Hang,
drown, imprison, starve the poor wretch who is guilty of the
atrocious crime of poverty, if you will ; but philosophy such
as that of our doctor, cannot endure that the dissenting con-
science should be touched, or that the voluntary principle in
religion should be in the least degree impeached.