The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1840-07-21 00:00:00

IMPORTANT TO MUNICIPAL VOTERS.

To secure a vote at the next municipal election, the
following is the necessary qualification, namely :
" The occupation on the ensuing 31st August, and
during the two preceding years, of a house, warehouse,
counting-house, or shop, within the borough, for which
the occupier is rated, and on which all rates due thereon,
except those becoming due within six months before the
31st, have been paid before that date."

The occupier must also, during the whole of that pe.
riod, (say two years and nine months,) have been an in.

habitant householder within seven miles of the borough.
The day on which claimants' qualifications must be
completed, and the last day for payment of rates, is the
31st of August. The sth of September is the day on
which the overseers are required to make out the burgess
lists, and to deliver them to the Town-clerk, who is to
fix a copy of them on the Town-hall, during the week
preceding the 15th of September.
A person succeeding to the occupation of a house, cRo.,
by descent, marriage, demise, 4-c., is entitled to reckon
as his own the occupancy and rating of the person by or
through whom he succeeds.

TO CORRESPONDENTS

We shall endeavour, in future, to supply the information
which " The Wife of a Subscriber " wishes to see in our
columns.

rbt 7Litirrpoof g9tantiarb.

TUESDAY

MORNING, JULY 21, 1840

We have received a copy of the St. John's (N. 8.,
Weekly Chronicle of the 12th of June. It does not

contain any news of importance

We have received our files of the Sydney Gnzette
and of the Sydney Commercial Journal to the 18th of
January, inclusive. They have been already antici-
pated by former arrivals to a later date.

We have received our files of the Berbice Advertiser
to the 18th of May, and of the Guiana Chronicle to

the 25th of May, both inclusive. As we have pre
viously received a file of the Guiana Times to th

latter date, we have no extracts to make,

Our files of the Jamaica Royal Gazette and Standard
reach to the 9th of June. They furnish us with a
more correct account of the recent disturbance in the
island than those furnished by the American papers.
'We give the particulars elsewhere. The island was,
at the latest dates, in the enjoyment of comparative
tranquillity; but great complaints are still made of the
deficient shipments of produce from the different
ports.

There is in Liverpool, and throughout the kingdom,
a large and influential class, composed of persons who,
whilst sincerely attached to the established religion and
institutions of their country, have hitherto allowed
themselves to be dragged along, by the influence of
early predilection, or by sincere—although, we think,

mistaken—conviction, in that march of democracy
whose aim and end are the subversion of that religion
and the destruction of those institutions.

Linder the guidance of such an administration as
that of Earl Grey—an administration to whose very
emrs we cannot refuse the palliation of integrity of
purpose and purity of motive—this section of re-
formers might consistently feel at ease. They saw at
the helm of the vessel in which they were embarked
men who had a determinate object in view—who were
bound to a fixed port, on their arrival at which they
hoped to be allowed to drop their anchor, and to ride
calmly in a quiet sea, after the turbulence of their
tempestuous voyage. But since an unruly and mu-
tinous spirit drove the commander in whom they had
confided from his post, and, one by one, the ablest
and most trusty of his crew were displaced by inexpe-
rienced and reckless men, with wild objects in view,
and without either principle or prudence to check
them in the means adopted to attain them, that confi-
dence has in a great measure ceased ; and the want of
it, in many instances betrayed, is only. prevented from
being more loudly and plainly manifested by the mor-

Al fear of drawing upon themselves and upon their
Lotives the ribald sneer of the unreflecting or wicked
isociates of their past political career.

To this section of the reform party—to this rem-

nant of the constitutional reformers of the present
generation—we wish to address ourselves ; to point
out their position and its tendency, and to phew the
course which it behoves them to pursue, as real and
true friends of their country and its institutions, if

they wish, as we fervently believe they do, to preserve
that country from anarchy and its institutions from
overthrow. In performing this duty, we shall abstain
from any attempt to excite needless alarm, or to raise
a false sympathy. We appeal to their judgment, and
not to their passions ; and however conscious of our

inability to lay before them, in fitting terms, the strong
and urgent necessity which calls upon them to retrace,
so far as they can, their past steps,—to pause upon
the threshold of revolution—not perhaps a bloody, yet
still dc facto a revolution,—and to take their stand
upon the rock of Protestantism, as the only position

from which the constitutional liberties of their country
can be effectually asserted; yet we trust that we shall
be able, at the least, to induce some—the reflecting
portion—of our countrymen to look ahead before they

embark in the new voyage, upon which they are in-
vited to set out by the crimps of the revolutionary fac-

There must be, we submit, some limit to the objects
of the constitutional reformer. There must be some
point beyond which the constitutional reformer cannot
advance, without hazard to those principles which he
has been accustomed to regard as essential to the ex-
istence of a well-organised state of society. We are
not prepared to argue that the progress of improvement
should be altogether arrested, for such a doctrine would
go to impugn the designs of a beneficent Creator, who
has made mankind capable of the greatest amount of
moral happiness and civilisation ; but we do argue
that reform, in the modern and conventional sense of
the term, is not always synonymous with improve-
ment, and may be pushed so far beyond its proper
bounds as to become a positive injury instead of a
substantial good. As depletion or the use of stimu-
lants are occasionally required to correct the irregula-
rities of the human frame, so amelioration or increased
stringency of legislation are required to correct those
of the political frame : and that man is equally an un-
skilful practitioner or a desperate quack, who bleeds
his patient to death or stimulates him to delirium, as
he is an incapable or dishonest statesman who, by
relaxing the bonds of the law, introduces anarchy and
revolution into the state, or, by too stringent and harsh
policy, drives its members into rebellion.

The class of reformers to which we address ourselves
had in view the moral and political happiness of the
community, so far as it could be carried without dan-
ger to its existing institutions—to that Protestant church
and to that form of governmult of which they were
component members. To enable them to effect this
object they called for a large measure of parliamentary
reform ; and this they have had conceded to them, to
au extent admitted to be beyond their wildest expecta-
They called for a change in the municipal in-
stitutions of the country ; and that also they have
gained. By these two great measures they secured
into their own hands both the legislative and muni-
cipal governments, and proceeded to carry out their
own views and their own principles into the financial
and social regulations of the empire. Every great
measure contended for at the outset of their onward
march has been passed—every leading principle as-
serted; and the objects which now remain to be ac-
complished—which form the theme of reform agitation
and the subject of the diatribes of their press, daily
and weekly, metropolitan and provincial—are no longer
great objects, founded upon universal principles, but
mere desultory matters, upon not one of which they
can depend upon the support of a decided majority
even in a reformed House of Commons—reformed
upon their own plan, and elected during their own admi-
nistration.

The position, then, of the whig or reform party is,
in effect, this. Their legitimate objects, as reformers
of the constitution, are effected, so far as public opi-
nion will allow them to be carried ; and the very tern
reform, in its true acceptation, has lapsed. A reformer
is now merely a whig—a supporter of whig measures
and a whig government ; or has become a radical, and
clamours for ultra measures and a democratic govern-
And so it ought to be, and so we wish it to

remain. We have, as a community, established the
form of that constitution under which we wish to be
governed ; and we are now, as members of that con-
stitution, to decide upon the measures and principles
best fitting to be introduced amongst us, and upon the
men—call it the party, if you please—best able and
most ready to carry those principles and those mea-
sures into effect. We must no longer be deluded by
a name—by a name, too, of which it may now be said,
" Stat nominis umbra" ; we must no longer follow a
jumble of inconsistencies, because it is chosen to be
designated " reform." We must now look to distinct
and tangible objects—to objects that may be weighed
ar.d valued; and not run blindly after a meteor, which
shuns us as we pursue it, and may be worthless when

attained.
We have come, then, to that point at which those
men who set out as constitutional reformers may with
perfect consistency pause, and examine the ulterior
objects and the character of the party which urges
them still onward. With the present House of Com-
mons and the present constituency, it is evident that
the existing ministry are at a " dead lock." They can
no longer propel the political machine in those reck-
less and dangerous courses to which their inclination

leads, and in the effort to effect which the public bubi-
ness of the country is impeded or altogether neglected.
Beset on one side by needy sycophants, whose support
is only afforded them as a matter of barter, and bullied
on another by a wild and desperate set of men, whose
avowed objects are revolution and anarchy, and whose
support is only given when their measures insidiously
tend to the realisation of those objects ; they are alone
restrained from plunging more deeply and irremediably
into difficulty by the imposing array of conservative
strength, which the country is pouring in at every
vacancy, to stand by and defend from innovation the
" ancient ways " of the constitution.

In this dilemma the administration party are anx-

iously casting about for the means of recruiting their
thinned ranks; and to effect this object fresh baits will

be held out to entrap the thoughtless and unwary ;
new principles will be broached, and new alliances
entered into. Of what nature those temptations and
those principles may be, we must confess it is difficult

to determine ; but the new alliance—if indeed it he a
new alliance—is sufficiently manifest. That alliance is
with Popery and with Repeal—with a mendicant agi-
tator wielding the power of Popish Ireland, and bought
at the price of a dismemberment of the empire !
It becomes now, therefore, the duty of the sincere
reformer to determine whether he will ally himself with

this new Popish crusade—for it is a Popish crusade--
against the institutions of his country—against its
Protestant church and Protestant form of government;

or whether he will fall back into the ranks of those
statesmen of his party, who, having gone their
contemplated length in reform, are now seeking to
strengthen and to fortify their position from its ex-
treme principle—democracy. It becomes his duty,

too, to lose sight for awhile of mere theoretical
changes, and examine the practical working, the actual
administration, of the powers of the political machine

under Its present guidance. We are, as a nation,
steeped to the lips in difficulties—commercial, social,
and financial. But can no remedy, we ask, be found
except in political change ? Can no practical measures
assuage the evils complained of ? Are we still, when-
ever afflicted—whenever suffering from tangible and:,
determinate causes, to lOok only to one resource, viz.,
the infusion of a fresh portion of the democratic prin-
ciple into the state ? Will it be said that the present
pattern constitution can afford no remedy, or is it the
sheer incapacity of those who direct it which prevents
the remedy being applied ? We suspect the latter;
and we urge upon every sound constitutional reformer,'
who ought at the same time to be a sincere lover of
his country, to examine for himself and to judge for
himself; pnd if he can come to the conclusion—and`
we think he can come to no other—that to the blun-
dering and shallow policy of the ministerial party we.
may attribute the distressed and dishonoured condition
of Great Britain, we urge upon him no longer to with-
hold, from the motives of a false shame or a sickly fear,.
that support which his conscience tells him that he is
bound to render to the tried friends of his country,
her interests, and her still glorious constitution !

We appeal, then, to the constitutional reformers
throughout the empire to stand forward at the present
crisis, and avert the calamity which is impending over
their country. Let them say to those who ask them
for their vote and countenance to the new ministerial
alliance, "We have aided you when we thought that
your cause was ours—when we thought that your
cause was that of the constitution ; but we will not
aid any party, by whatever sounding title they may
choose to designate themselves, who are allied with
the enemies of our faith and the abettors of treason
and rebellion. In advocating reform, we sought for
good government as its result. We looked for it creased
prosperity to be infused into every department of trade
and commerce : we find only distress and embarrass-
ment. We looked for the fulfilment of your Magnifi-
cent promises ; and we find only bitter disappointment.
Wherefore should we still lean on a broken reed, or
cling to a falling btlitding ?" Let this be th answer
of every true reformer to thbse who ask him to assist
in giving a fresh impetus to the car of the political
Juggernaut, in whose destroying course are found
Only blood and ashes—the blood of our Protestant
fellow-countrymen,. the ruin of our commerce, and
the sacrifice of our national church and our national
honour!

To the sound portion of the reformers of Liverpool
we appeal in particular. They have before their eyes
the criminal apathy of the present government, upon
every question which affects their prosperity as mer-
chants and tradesmen, and the postponement on all
occasions of British to anti-national and party interests.
Will these men, we ask, with their accumulation of
injuries received at the hands of a contemptible and
dishonest government, be content, in order to prop up
for a brief period that imbecile thing, to ally themselves
with the Popish hordes of Irish whom its servile tools
have within the last week been foisting upon the regis-
ter, for the purpose of swamping the bona fide consti-
tuency of their town ? We trust not. We trust that,
in Liverpool at least, this impudent attempt to intrude
an Irish Catholic faction, as the dictators over and
tyrants of freeborn Englishmen, will be frustrated, by
the formation of a FIRM AND COMPACT ALLIANCE

AMONGST ALL THOSE WHO CALL THEMSELVES

THE FRIENDS AND SUPPORTERS OF OUR PROTES-

TANT CONSTITUTION AND LIBERTIES

The Protector Society, formed for the purpose of
swamping the Protestant constituency of Liverpool, by
enrolling as voters hordes of Irish Papists, terminated
their registering labours last night, having paid the
rats and taxes of upwards of 800 of the lowest charac-
ters in the town, men who never paid a rate or a tax in
their lives before. Is not this enough to rouse the in-
dignation of Englishmen ? May we not anticipate from
this the fierce and deadly attack, which at the next elec-
tion will be made by the Irish priests upon the repre-
sentation of this borough ?
The question—" Who are, and who are not to he
members for Liverpool," will now be decided at the
sensual orgies of Derrynane, or in the gloomy cloisters
of Maynooth ; and this loyal English borough, like
Carlow or Kilkenny, will be sold by the Irish agitator
to men who will swear allegiance to him, and prostrate
themselves to the Church of Rome. A freethinking
Hume, or a Socinian Yates, if either of .them will pay
the price, may now become a representative of Liver-
pool ; or, if these prefer the honourable posts of
" natural joints of the tail," our borough will find pur-
chasers in others equally willing to follow in the foot-
steps, equally willing to be the slaves, of the Irish