The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1841-03-23 00:00:00

parishioners were kept on the verg

of starvation—to add hue

penny a week to the cost of supporting the miserable victims

of misfortune and poverty

—and on what ground ?

an injustice to the poor rate-payer" ! I
imagine there are not many rate-payers in Liverpool at least

Because

to do so would be

who would complain of such an injustice

It had been urged that so strong is the repugnance which

exists amongst the suffering door to enter into the union
workhouses, that in one instance a wretched being had been

discovered literally starved to death in a garret, who was
proved to have carried in his pocket for three days an order
of admission to the workhouse, and to have preferred, at
last, this most miserable death which human nature can
know, to the protracted torture which was prepared for him
in that abode of despair and wretchedness. And Lord John
Russell ventured even to defend the odious cruelty by which
that bountiful provision which the constitution of our ances-
tors has provided for the victim of misfortune, at the expense
of his more affluent fellow-beings, if hedged round withiuch
unsupportable and wantonly-inflicted degredation, that death
itself is deemed preferable to its acceptance. Yet this " libe-
ral" lordling—who appears to possess, with the form, the
deep malignity of the Elfin race—had the assurance to con-
tend that it is wise and Christian policy which renders the

last shelter which offers itself to suffering wretchedness as a
barrier against starvation, so revolting to all the feelings of
humanity as to be scarcely preferable to the very extremity of

buman misery

The remarks which fell from Sir Robert Peel were cha-
racterized by more of a Christian spirit and less of mere
utilitarianism than he has previously displayed upon this sub-
ject. Still, I cannot think that we have much to be thankful
for when we look at the votes by which those remarks were
accompanied. Sir Robert has given his deliberate sanction
to a prolongation of the Somerset House_ tyranny for five
!store years; and although that permission waaolloWea by a

rebuke to the commissioners for the superfluous cruelty of
their regulations, and especially for the " harshness of lan-
guage" in which those regulations ere conveyed ; yet Sir Ro-
bert Peel ought not to be blind to the fact that it is not to the

harshness of language only but to the working principle of
the whole measure that nine-tenths of the people of England
object. The right hon. baronet had an opportunity before
him of gaining for ever the reverenee and love of that people,
by standing forward boldly to demand, in their name, the
cessation of this tyranny which " grinds the faces of the
'—but he haslet slip the opportunity. He professes to
see, indeed, the necessity of abating the tyranny ; but he may
rest assured that no half-way measures—no weapon which
loes not strike at the root of the evil—which does not de-
stroy utterly the centralization principle—can ever effect this
abject. The odious nature of the system cannot be abated.
It must be utterly destroyed.
In the House of Lords on Friday a petition was presented
by the Earl of Aberdeen from certain of the inhabitants of
the colony of Newfoundland, praying that some measure of
protection might be afforded them in the exercise of their
vil right

It may be interesting to your readers to know
that the constitution which was in 1832 conceded by the
vhig government to the demands of popery in that colony is
lmost precisely similar, as regards the franchise, to that
bout to be conceded to popery in Ireland ; and that so in-
buses so attendant upon its working—so
wholly are the people placed under the control of priestly in-
timidation and outrage, when seeking to exercise their privi-
leges of electing members—that the governor-general has
actually found it necessary to refuse the issue of any further

ufferable are the o

writs, after the expiration of the present session, until some
measure of protection is devised. A pleasant foretaste cer-

tainly of the result of a similar measure nearer home!

TO THE CONSTITUENCIES OF PROTESTANT
ENGLAND.-LETTER

FELLOW PROTESTANTS,—I inquired of you, in my last,
whether you would endure the perpetuation, by Lord Mor-
peth's bill, of the grinding tyranny by which your opinions
and feelings are at present outraged ;—whether you are pre-;
pared to add to the numerical strength of these Romish emi-
saries, whose votes, purchased by the surrender of the prin-
ciples of your Protestant constitution to their insolent de-
mands, enable a profligate faction to trample upon the liber-
ties of the British people. Permit me now briefly to bring
before your notice what must be the immediate effect of the
passing of that measure.

The ►municipal strength of the Popish body in parliament
at present amounts to upwards of 40 votes, the whole of which
are exercised in servile dependence upon the dictates of the
member for Dublin and the priesthood of Ireland. In this
number it must be borne in mind that I do not include the
whole of the " liberal" members for Irish constituencies, but
merely those who are known to hold their seats subject to
the influence of O'Connell and the priesthood, and whose
votes in the house are embraced in the compact entered into
by Popery with Lord Melbourne's administration. The ope-
ration of Lord Morpeth's bill in lowering the stains of the
constituencies, will add at least 30 democratic members to
the Romish interest ; and the member for Dublin will tben
be able to wave, in insulting defiance over the deliberations
of the British people, a " tail" comprising 70 and odd joints,
and even more effectually than at present to place in the
hands of the Church of Rome the substantive power of the
government of Great Britain.

And what, let me ask, would be the first demand which
this ruffian, gorged with the accession of his new strength,
and inflated with the insolence of his coarse and brutal na-
ture, would endeavour to win from the cringing imbeciles
who would thus be placed so completely at his mercy? Have
not his own lips told you-what that demand would be ? Un-
doubtedly they have.. You have yielded to him one-fourth
of the tithes of the Irish Church, and he has told you deli-
berately that he " will never be contented until the whole is
yielded up !" The wolf of Rome slept without the thresh-
hold of Protestantism, where the mailed hands of the war-
riors of the reformation had chained him down. You have
waked him from that sleep. You have allowed him to dip
his fang in the body of the Protestant Church of Ireland, and
now he is straining to break from his last fetter, and to quench
his burning thirst in a feast of blood. You have allowed him
to desecrate the portals of the house of God, and, he demands
now to be permitted to throw down the altar. Yes—the
Protestant Church of Ireland must be yielded up. It stinks
in the nostrils of Popery, and must be resigned to her tender
mercies. The humble spires which rise amidst the green
hills and vallies of that land of superstition, with their small
congregations of decent and devout worshippers, who bow
the knee to no power save that of the God whom they adore,
are distasteful to the disciples of Maynooth, who joy only to
gaze upon crowds of crawling and abject wretches prostrating
themselves in the degradation of their penances, or rushing
uRh seared hearts and inflamed passions from the darkness
of the confessional to midnight outrage. Those spires must
no more, on Sabbath morn or eve, send forth upon the air
of heaven " the sound of the church-going bar —those
humble worshippers must either be coerced to bend the kne
in temples of idolatry, or be driven to seek the bread of li