The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1847-08-03 00:00:00

THE LIVERPOOL STANDARIi.

population of twenty-seven millions. Wages in the
former period were high, employment abundant, the
working classes prosperous, with an export of British and
colonial produce of from X 45,000,000 to £50,000,000
annually : in the latter, wages were in many trades low,
employment difficult, suffering general, with an annual
exportation of £120,000,000 to £130,000,000.
" But extraordinary and apparently inexplicable as these
facts are, they are yet exceeded in marvel by the details of
our social and economical state, during this period of un-
paralleled increaf in ou-

—case material resources. It may
safely be affirmed that the anxiety and distress which
were felt during that brilliant period of national growth
have never been surpassed, at least in a state possessing
the external mark of prosperity. It is well known to
what straits the Bank of England has been reduced on
two different occasions in that period. In December,
1825, it was, as all the world knows, in very great diffi-
culties. We were, as Mr. Huskisson said, within
twenty-four hours of barter.' In November, 1839, the
stock of specie was reduced to £2,800,000, and the bank

was under the necessity of negotiating ' a loan of
£10,000,000 sterling from the Bank of France. There
can be no impropriety in mentioning these facts, which
are universally known, regarding that magnificent
establishment, which now has above £15,000,000 of ,
bullion and specie accumulated in its coffers. The dis-
tress among the mercantile classes for years after the
dreadful crisis of December, 1825—0 f the agricultural
interest during the low prices from 1832 to 1835, and of
the whole commercial community from 1837 to 1842, was
extreme. Wages sank during these disastrous periods, in
the manufacturing districts, so low, that they barely suf-
ficed with the great bulk of workers, especially females,
for the support of existence. Serious insurrections broke
out in 1820 and 1842, both in England and Scotland,
ostensibly for political purposes, but mainly occasioned
by the general distress among the manufacturing opera-
tives, as was decisively proved by their entire extinction
when labour again received a remunerating turn.
Farming capital in the agricultural districts was, during
their distress, everywhere grievously abridged—in many
places totally annihilated. Ireland during the whole
period has been in a state of smothered insurrection.; and
for the last four years has convulsed the country by the
fierce demand for the repeal of the Union, which was only
prevented from breaking out into open rebellion by the
continued presence in that island of thirty thousand armed
men, between the regular forces and armed police. The
manufacturing districts of Scotland were involved, during
the same period, in such distress, that in 1837 the
mortality in Glasgow was 1 in 22; in 1842, 1 in 30; and
in the latter year 32,000 persons took typhus fever in that
city, and the deaths were upwards of 10,000, out of a popu-
lation not exceeding, at that period, 280,000 souls. Thelate
Poor-law Commission has accumulated evidence proving
to demonstration the existence of severe and unheard-of
distress among the poor of all parts of Scotland, gene-
rally esteemed, and in some respects with reason, the
best-conditioned part of the empire. The Poor-law Com-
mission for Ireland has shown that there are in that fertile
land no less than 2,300,000 persons in a state of almost
permanent destitution. The heart sickens at the proofs,
numerous and incontrovertible, which the parliamentary
reports for the last ten years have accumulated, of wide-
spread and often long-enduring suffering among the
labouring poor in England.
" While wealth was increasing to an unparalleled extent
among the commercial classes, suffering and distress as
generally ensued among the rural inhabitants ; and the
multitude of ruined fortunes among them rendered it
certain that at no distant period the old race of landed
proprietors would, with the exception of a few magnates, be
all rooted out, and their place supplied by a new set of pur-
chasers from the commercial towns. While population was
advancing with unparallelled strides in the manufacturing
districts, pauperism even more than kept pace with it
in all ; and the extraordinary fact has now been revealed
by statistical researches that, in an age of unbounded
wealth, and general and long-continued peace, a seventh
part of the whole inhabitants of the British islands are in
a state of destitution, or painfully supported by legal
relief. While all attempts even to pay off the National
Debt have been abandoned by government, and the prin-
ciple openly proclaimed by the Prime Minister, that any
surplus of revenue above expenditure must, to relieve the
necessities of the country, be applied to the reduction of
taxation, without a thought to the reduction of the debt,
the Home Secretary has announced the not less alarming
fact, that since the peace above two hundred millions
sterling, or a fourth of the National Debt, has been raised
for the relief of the poor in England alone. While the
returns of the Income-tax have demonstrated that seventy
thousand persons in Great Britain possess among them
an annual revenue of two hundred millions a-year, or
about £2,300 each on an average, the melancholy tact
has been revealed, by the result of attempts to increase
the national revenue by means of indirect taxation, that
that source of income can no longer be relied on ; and in
a time of profound, and at the close of a period of long-
continued peace, it has become indispensable to recur to
an assessment on property and direct taxation, as it was
in Rome in the decaying days of the empire."

The progress of crime increased, pari passu, with
this inflated prosperity of the capitalist, interspersed
with periods of revulsion and suffering amongst the
commercial classes, on the one hand, and steady
deterioration of the condition of the landowner, the
farmer, the operative and labourer, on the other.
According to Mr. Porter's Parliamentary Tables, the
following were the total Committals for Serious
Crime in Great Britain and Ireland, and the popu-

lation, in-

Total,