The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1841-09-10 00:00:00

rofitabel to the community in any one way

noderate Whig • would necessarily wish for a chang
Lnd our expectation therefore is, that at the nest elegy

tion all moderate Whigs will vote for conservati
councillors.

But there is a further reason which ought to influ-
ence him, and it is this, that since our new municipal
corporation was formed, it has ever been in the hands
of one party, and of one only; now, before we con-
demn the act of parliament altogether, which has

given us so inefficient a local government, another
party ought to have a trial ; this is only fair towards
your own act ; wherefore on this ground we would
expect that a reasonable. Whig would vote for conser-
vative candidates. Let us ascertain what could be
done under the act with a conservative council. We
never admired that piece -of legislation much, but we

should like much to see it worked conservatively. We
lave frequently made our acknowledgments to the
parliamentary reform bill ; we should be gled to turn
io far Whig, as to stty so much for their municipal

We alluded last week to the preparations makir
and the attempts likely to be made, for the purpose

swamping the friends of order in the registries, witl
view principally to the 'municipal elections; and

repeat that, on this head, the Conservatives cannot be
too much upon their guard, judging from what we
know the Liberal party, as they call themselves, have
done here, and, we are infoirned, they do in other
places. In Dublin they have lately carried on their
fraudulent proceedings with such a shameless defiance
of all decency,. as, happily for the Conservative cause,
is likely to re-act with unexpected mischief on their
own heads. The Municipal Act has not yet been put
in force in Ireland, and the process of carrying it into
effect, is now for the first time in motion. To the

churchwardens of the several parishes was entrusted
the important duty of preparing the burgess
which, when completed, they were required to return
to the Lord Lieutenant ; but conceive what must have
been the handywork of the Papist party, when the
churchwardens of the several parishes of Dublin de-
clared, that such were the alterations, interlineations,

and, of course, falsifications made in the rating-books
of the Poor Law Guardians (from which the lists were
to be taken), that they could not perform the task as-
signed them in any satisfactory manner ! Lord For-
tescne, however, peremptorily commanded that they
should make their returns—threatening them with im-

mediate law proceedings and heavy penalties if the:
disobeyed. By these means returns were extracte(
from them, but they were made under protest, and w
perceive that petitions have been presented to botl
houses of parliament representing the entire transac
tion, and complaining of such outrageous proceedings.
Earl de Grey arrives in Dublin this day, and it is con
fidently expected that seeing it to be impossible to di
justice to Protestant Ireland, if the Dublin municipa
election were to go on upon pretended burgess roll lists

made up from forged or falsified entries purpose
inserted in order to give a preponderance to the Rad
cats, his lordship will, as he has the power, in 11

capacity of Lord Lieutenant, postpone the election, or,
in other words, continue the old Corporation for
another year. Thus the vaulting ambition of the
O'Connellites would have over-leapt itself—their frau-
dulent rapacity defeat its own ends. 'We refer to the
business to show our readers what the party are
capable of doing to attain their objects.
Will the ConserVatives of Liverpool, then, we ask,
submit to having a municipal Council chosen by such
persons, or by persons who fraterniSe with them, and
not only sympathise with their views, but would prac-
tise the same devices to carry them out if they might?
If not, let them be wise and alert in time.

AN ANALYSIS OF OUR EXPORTS OF COTTON
GOODS, VIEWED IN RELATION TO THE PRO-
POSED FREE-TRADE MEASURES OF LORD
MELBOURNE'S GOVERNMENT.—No. 11.

It is urged that if we take the timber and the corn of Eu-
ropean nations, who now only purchase from us our cotton
yarns, they will then be enabled to purchase more largely
our perfect manufactures. It is urged also that the native
consumer, paying less for his food, will be able fully to main-
tain his present consumption of manufactured goods. Ma-
nifestly, however, the latter assumption is dependent upon
the realization of the former. The British labourer, when
agricultural pursuits become unproductive and the demand
for his labour in those pursuits is decreased, cannot afforl
to consume at all, unless increased employment is found,
sufficient to compensate him for the want of that which has
been destroyed; and that increased employment, we have
seen, cannot be afforded by any increase in our trade with
those countries, unless that increase is in finished fabrics,
into which labour largely enters. Have we, then, any sure
ground for the supposition that the countries of Northern
Europe, from which our supplies of corn and timber must
be principally derived, will become, through the influence of
the proposed abandonment of our present protective policy,
large consumers of our manufactured cotton cloths?

A very brief examination of the condition and the habits
of the people of these countries, and of their climate as well,
will suffice to shew that no measures of ours can ever make
them consumers of our lighter and more expensive fabrics.
Our coarse, heavy materials might, indeed, by possibility,
'be brought into consumption ; but those goods which afford
the greatest amount of manufacturing employment for their
production Ix e can scarcely hope to induce the agricultural
labourers of Russia or Poland, of Norway, Denmark or
Sweden, to exchange for their present covering of coarse

woollen, even if we could succeed in so far raising their con-
dition as to enable them to make the exchange. Perhaps
some impulse might be given to our goods trade with the
markets of Germany ; but it must be borne in mind that the
people of that country are not themselves likely to become
large exporters of grain to England, and that whatever in-

from us.
The foreigner who now takes from us the yarn which he
requires for the supply of his own looms, we maw rest as-
sured, is too well acquainted with the value, to him, of a
prosperous manufacture to be lightly tempted into abandon-
ing its pursuit ; and, when he asks us to take his surplus
corn, is not disposed to push the principle of reciprocity so
far as our manufacturers would have us imagine. The con-
cession from us, which is sought for, we have no doubt
would be gratefully accepted ; and we have as little doubt
that, so far from inducing the foreigner to abandon that sys-
tem of manufactures which for the last 25 years he has been
so sedulously engaged in erecting, it will be used by hiM only
as a means of increasing his powers of manufacturing. We
give prosperity to the foreign corn and timber grower, not,
we are assured, to enable him to extend the growth of the
manufactures of his own country ; and the only result,
therefore, which we shall derive from opening to him our
markets, will be an increase of the least valuable portion Gf
our export trade. The manufacture of cotton yarn will re-
ceive an impulse, which will be co-extensive with the in-
creased prosperity which we shall have conferred upon the
foreign manufacturer; but here the direct effect of our
change of policy must stop. So far as th great corn and
timber-producing countries are concerned, the remaining
branches of our cotton exports will be little affected ; and
any increase. which the free-trade measures of Lord Mel-
bourne and his colleagues are to afford to these branches,
can only be looked for from the cheapening of food at home,
and the means thus afforded to the manufacturer of cheapen-
ing production, by reducing the price of labour to the bread
standard.
Before proceeding to this part of the subject, however, let
us examine the nature of the question between the Brazilian

and the West Indian cultivator, the latter of whom we are
urged, upon the principles of free trade, to sacrifice to the
former. Our exports of cotton goods to Brazil are large—
amounting last year, as the table before us states, to
£2,525,037—whi15t those to Cuba, and the other foreign
West Indian colonies which are included in this question.
were £101,382 ; and we are assured that, without a reduc-
tion of our discriminating duties upon sugar and other
Brazilian produce, we shall be excluded, upon the expiration
of the present commercial treaty, from the markets of that
country, or at the least be driven to enter them upon less
favourable terms than at present. We will not now insist
upon the fact that no such dreadful denzivation is before us ;
that, by the market which Great Britain affords for its cot-
ton, coffee, and other produce, she is in a position to ensure
a renewal of that treaty upon favourable terms. We will put
aside, too, the ipiestion of slavery entirely ; and, viewing the
trada with Brazil upon its own merits, we are prepared to
maintain that the proposed reduction of the discriminating
duties upon foreign and British colonial sugars would not be
productive of that substantial benefit to our manufacturing
community which is insisted upon by its advocates ; that—

independent of the loathing entertained by the people of this
country towards that traffic in human flesh, which such a
measure would so fearfully stimulate—the export trade to
our own free colonies, which would be destroyed by it, is
infinitely morewaluable to us as a manufacturing community
than that which we shall gain.

In amount the present cotton exports of Great Britian to
her sugar-producing colonies are fully equal to her exports to
Brazil. Laseyear, we find from the document before quoted,
our West Indian islands took from us manufactured cotton
goods to the amount of ;C1,234,687 ; and when we know that
it was a year of short crops, and consider, besides, the mise-
rably inefficient supply of labour under which those colonies
are suffering, we may safely look forward to a large increase
of consumption in the ordinary course of events. When we
add, however, to this amount the exports to the Mauritius—
and such a portion of the present amount of tour millions
and upwards of our exports of cotton goods to the East
Indies as may fairly be said to be at stake upon the decision
of the sugar duties—we shall have, at the least, a nominal
equality of exports of cotton goods taken by British sugar-
producing colonies and by the foreign slave-owning states.

Upon the principle, however, which we have before laid
down, with respect to the comparative value of our export
trade to different markets, we believe that the value to Great
Britain, as a manufacturing country. of the trade to her own
colonies is, although nominally and apparently equal, far
greater in reality than that which is attempted to be weighed
in the scale against it, inasmuch as it affords employment to
a greater quantity of manufacturing labour. To both these
great markets we export finished goods alone ;. but to our
West India colonies even at present these goods are of a
much better class—more remunerative to the British manu-
facturer and more nearly approaching in description to the
fabrics of borne consumption—than the markets of the
Brazils can take from us : and as the free population of the
West Indies advance in the scale of civilization and pros-
perity. and imbibe more and more a taste for the habits Of
European life, we may anticipate from those colonies a still
larger and more valuable demand. The trade with Brazil is
almost exclusively a trade in those articles which are suited
for the consumption of a slave population ; and we believe
that there can scarcely be a doubt as to the superior value,
to the trader or the manufacturer, of the consumption of a
free population, when compared with that of one in which the
slave class largely predominates. With the effect of such a
measure as the reduction of the sugar duties upon the
condition of our home population, we have in this enquiry
nothing to do. That measure might temporarily reduce the
cost of sugar to the English consumer; but we are quite sa-
tisfied that it would never promote largely, by its action upon
our export trade, the increased employment required by the
manufacturing labourer.