The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1836-02-19 00:00:00

rowed id2a, and as we are confident he is unconscious
the mischief his measure is sure to produce, it would be
as well for him to confess it:

We should not have noticed the subject at all had we
not been assured that ministers have agreed to support
the bill, and that there is a probability that it will be car-
ried 'in the present session. The difference or duty
against the East Indies amounts only to Bs. per cwt. Mr.
EWART proposes to reduce this to perfect equality, by
taking off 2s. annually for the next four years, at which
time the apprenticeship period in the West Indies 0411
have terminated.

But he has not told us what benefit the community or
the consumers of sugar are to derive meanwhile. The
first two shillings would only add to the profits of the
grocer and sugar refiner. The sum is not practically di-
visible so as to affect the price of a pound weight of su-
gar. The labouring classes would not save a single frac-
tion by the experiment. The four shillings of the se-
cond year would be equally indivisible; while at the end
of the fourth year, when the whole eight shillings are
taken off, and supposing the relative price of sugar to
remain the same, the extent of the benefit to the public
would not exceed a halfpenny per lb. in the reduction of

_..his were all, we should have left the borrowed
scheme to proceed unmolested under the protection of its
witless advocate ; but supposing that the reduction of
duty should lead to extensive and greatly increased im-
ports of East India sugar—imports likely to inundate
the market —what, in the name of justice andhumanity,
is to become of the West India planter and his emanci-
pated but helpless labourers ? It would be well for the
blustering philanthropists of this age of cant to consider
the effects of a reduction in the price of sugar upon the
black population, whom the planter might no longer he
enabled to employ, might be compelled to desert, leaving
them, without medical aid or religious instruction, to re-
lapse into barbarism, and sink down to the lowest depths
of demoralization.

The measure would lead to injurious consequences in
another way. The West India planter has at present,
with the paltry advantages which are left to him, but a
cheerless prospect. He may or he may not succeed in
training his emancipated slaves to be industrious free
labourers. We do not believe that they are capable, by
any process of education, of being converted into indus-
trious labourers, except by some oimpulsory law. But
admitting, for the sake of argument, that they can be so
trained, and that the planter has at present every possi-
ble inducement to persevere in his efforts to render them
obedient and industrious, useful to him, to themselves,
and to society, how can he be expected to persevere in
the face of this equalization bill, which must naturally
alarm him and make his chances of success more doubt-
ful the nearer he approaches the termination of the ap-
prenticeship ? Its tendency is to shake whatever portion
of confidence he has in his own powers, or in the ho-
nesty, good faith, and generous policy of the government.
He may reason in this way—lf the British legislature
admit India sugars on equal terms with West India su-
gars in 1840, what is to prevent them from admitting
Brazil and other foreign sugars on the same conditions in
I 1845 ?

These, we beg to state, are no imaginary fears. They
are founded upon the reasoning and the conviction of
several eminent and experienced West India proprie-
tors. We have reason to know that if the equalization
bill pass into a law, there are many of them who will
abandon their plantations before this time two years.
They are disposed at present to try the emancipation ex-
periment faithfully, strenuously, and conscientiously;
but if new obstacles are to be thrown in their way, and
new competitors brought from India into the British su-
gar market, they will despair of success, and retire from
a moral struggle in which they are enduring more hard-
ships than the emancipated negroes whom they are
making every sacrifice to civilize. But we shall return
to this subject.

All our readers, of course, recollect the fable of the
frog and the cow. In that fable they will see reflected
the absurd and inflated manners of the liberal members
of our new town council. Like the dancing-master in
Roderick Random they indeed cut their capers by the
book, but a clown of mature age can hardly be rubbed
into a gentleman. It is amusing, and sometimes pitia-
ble, to mark the change which office produces in certain
persons, who, forgetting whence they came or what they

are, consider themselves a superior class of-mortals to

he men of the common world.
But of such is our new council chiefly composed.

The haughty and aristocratic airs which some of them
assume, in the discharge of their official or delegated du-
ties, might become old Dog berry, and in him would only
provoke laughter; but they must excite very different
sensations, which we have no wish to describe, in those

who know them intimately, and have known them under
other circumstances. This littleness of mind, united
with the self-importance of official station, which hap-
pens to be entirely new to them, and the duties of which
they do not understand because they cannot appreciate
the narrowed responsibilities of their authority, leads
them into blunders every day, which are amplified, ac-
cording to poetic license, into the standing jokes of the
town. Four-and-twenty tailors, on the afternoon of a
Monday holiday, employing logarithms for the purpose
of ascertaining the stitches and clippings in a pair of
breeches, would not be the subject of richer humour than
the figures mathematical and rhetoi ical, which the
philo-
sophers of the ToWn-hall resort to in elucidating ques-
tions of the plainest description, and which a ploughboy
would instantly resolve by the rules of common sense.
But no ; common sense is held in small repute by our
popular and liberal Solons. They must be starched to
appear genteel; presuming to evince their power; rude
to show their contempt for other men ;. pompous for the
purpose of being formal, and insolent to extort respect
from those who heartily despise them. In short they
delight in the display of powers which they do not pos-
sess, but which they assume only to make themselves ri-
diculous.

It is, we suppose, owing to the self complacency n
Itese men that they are so glaringly inconsistent. Ir

the pride of office they have forgotten all their former
professions, and lay claim to that which they laboured
hard for years to wrest from the hands of their predeces-
sors. Is there a person so young as not to know that a
vast proportion of the members of the new council have
contended during the greater part of their lives that the
trustees of the dock estate ought to be chosen from and
elected by the rate-payers, and that those who contributed
to the estate should have the power to elect its managers.
We have heard no other song from the liberal party for
the last tenryears. They contended that the corporation
had no right to manage the dock estate ; and even if they
had, that they were very unfit persons to be entrusted
with its management. Surely if that argument had ever
any weight it ought to have weight now, and be respected
and acted upon by the parties who propounded it. Are
the members of the new council more respectable, intelli-
gent, or independent than the members of the old corpo-
ration ? We answer no, far from it; why then should
they claim for themselves what they would have denied
to others ?
They tell us that the corporation, now being open to
the inhabitants, the electors will always take care that
the best men in the town will be returned to the council.
We deny the inference—we prove its fallacy by pointing
to the present batch of empty-headed talkers who fill the
chairs at the Town-hall. But admitting that popular
election is the best mode for securing eligible coun-
cillors, which we only do fur the sake of argument,
' what has that to do with the dock estate ? What
have four-fifths of the inhabitants of Liverpool to do
with the docks ? They pay no rates— they have
no funds invested—they hold no dock bonds. The inha-
bitants of Shore-ditch, the Tvlinories, and Ratcliff High-
way, in London, have as much right to elect the directors
of the Bank of England as the majority of the inhabitants
of Liverpool hare to elect dock trustees. The inhabi-
tants did not elect trustees—they elected councillors to
conduct the affairs of the town, and not to interfere with
the dock trust. But it would seem that these liberal
councillors wish to elect themselves into the trusteeship
without consulting either the rate-payers or the inha-bi.,