The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1840-05-08 00:00:00

FRIDAY MORNING, MAY 8, 1840.

Well has the Government of Lord Melbourne earned
for itself the title of " The Shabby Administration !"
There is no meanness of which its members have not
been convicted, and no degradation to which they will
not submit, in the hope of averting their approaching
fall. Their very existence as a Government has been
one continued crawl from foulness to foulness, and it
will never cease to be such until the indignant spirit of
England shall be roused, and the filthy things carted
away, from Downing-street and Whitehall, to luxuriate
amongst the congenial nastiness of St. Giles's or Seven
Dials.

We are not going to catalogue the long series of dis-
honourable and despicable tricks by which the Whig
party have for the last ten years contrived to fasten
theselves to place and pay—to place without power,
and pay without its equivalent. Our object is only to
call the attention of our readers to their last trick—
their la'st shuffle of the thimbles. We have before
characterised their opposition to the passing of Lord
Stanley's Irish Registration Bill as a disgraceful aban-
donment of principle to serve the purposes of faction;
but -we now find that an abandonment of principle
more flagrant than ever was attempted by even a Whig*
administration is not deemed a sufficient propitiation to
the truculent demagogue who controls and goads their
proceedings, without being accompanied by a trick as
Mean and despicable as ever was resorted to by a baffled
gamester to redeem a run of bad luck, or a pettifog-
ging lawyer to evade a just claim or bolster up a bad
cause.

It will be perceived, on reference to the debates in
parliament on Monday evening, that the ministerial
Inan of all work, Lord John Russell, brought in two
bills, having for their professed object a reform, upon
whig-radical principles, of the English system of re-
gistration of voters. We shall not here enter upon an
examination of the merits of these bills : our business
Is only with the motive which induced their being pre-

rented to the house at the present moment. We cer-
tainly, in our simplicity, had no suspicion that the bills
in question were any other than the ordinary attacks
upon the substantial features of the reform bill, which
have been made session after session, and been session
after session defeated. We find, however, that we have
sadly underrated the Machiavelian tact of this jesuiti-
cal Homunculus, and that their object is as insidious
as their introduction is degrading—if any thing could
further degrade so despicable a thing as the present
government.
In the Dublin Evening Post (a ministerial journal)
of April 14th, we find a report of an incendiary speech
delivered by O'Connell, in which, after boasting that,
in his opposition to Lord Stanley's registration bill, he
possessed the sympathising concurrence and co-opera-
tion of ministers, he proceeds to say that " Lord John
Russell has brought in a bill to amend the law of re-
gistration in England, which will give the house the le-
gitimate EXCUSE of postponing the Irish bill until the
English one be settled." The same language, almost
Word for word, is reported in the Dublin Monitor, the
Freeman's Journal, and the. Pilot, O'Connell's especial
organ, and we can therefore entertain no doubt of its
substantial correctness. Now, we ask our readers to
examine coolly this base and impudent effort of the
faction to wriggle out of the dilemnia into which the
measure of Lord Stanley has precipitated them. They
do not, they dare not, meet the discussion of this mea-
sure upon its merits. They dare not meet conserva-
tism in a fair stand-up fight, in the good old English
fashion. Artifice, trickery, and evasion are familiar to
them, and these despicable weapons are resorted to in-
stead of honest and manly argument.
. But we must, in justice to the faction, examine a little
further the motives of this shallow manoeuvre, and
place before our readers the full measure of infamy
which it displays. Our readers will scarcely be pre-
pared to expect that, after the evils of the Irish system
of registration have been so frequently admitted, and
especially the want of an annual revision of the regis-
ter; after these evils have been over and over again
distinctly admitted by government, and a remedy for
the evil—more especially as regards the principle of an
annual revision—attempted to be provided for by a bill
brought in by their own Attorney-General, the same
government should now be found endeavouring to as-
similate the English system of registration to that cor-
rupt and debasing system which they have themselves so
repeatedly denounced ! Yet such is the fact. This is
the EXCUSE which these mercenary slaves are afford-
ing to the House of Commons for postponing the bill
of Lord Stanley. This is the demonstration made to
Mislead and mystify the country, and to give a loop-
hole of retreat, by which their degraded tools—the
greedy expectants of pay and patronage—may escape
the necessity of annihilating themselves, by cutting
away the ladder of corruption and perjury by which
their " bad eminence" has been attained !
Let Lord Melbourne, after this instance of shameless
collusion with O'Connell, deny—if the feelings of an
English gentleman will allow him to do so—the en-
slaving nature of that compact, by which his adminis-
tration is bound hand and foot to the chariot wheels
of' that -6‘ base, bloody, and brutal" demagogue. Let
Lord Melbourne repudiate, if he chooses, a sympathy
With Irish treason. Let him disavow the repeal cry
if he dare. The people of England will not hesitate to
impute to his conduct and to his disavowal their pro-
Per designations; and when the day comes—as come
it will—that Ireland, inflamed, misled, and maddened,
shall, in the blindness.of her ignorance, rush headlong
into a 'desolating struggle, which will roll back for half
a century the progress which civilization and truth is
Making amongst her benighted population, the people
of England will not be slow to visit their due punish.:
'cent upon the heads of that mean and degraded fac.