The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1841-05-04 00:00:00

THOMAS BLACKBURN, I:SQ

Behold, reader, in the disciple of Esculapius whom we
now present to your notice, the great apostle of that " libe-
ral" and " enlightened" system of education which has
found favour in the eyes of the " liberal" and " enlightened"
portion of our Town Council—a system which we will not
embroil ourselves by describing further than as one by which
little boys and girls can be made into good readers, good
writers, good spellers, and even good philosophers, without
the odious necessity of being made, at the same time, good
Christians. We are very cautious, it will be observed, in
our description; for perhaps, were we to express our candid
opinion of the system in question, we might be set down as
being embued with " narrow sectarian views" and " old-
world prejudices" upon the subject of religion, which would
utterly destroy our reputation with the philosophic portion
of the community. In this character alone—as the " Mag-
nus Apollo" of our Corporation Schools—is the worthy
doctor presentable amongst the illustrious occupants of Our
Gallery ; for, in all other respects, we can only class him
with that ordinary race who, we are told, are to be found

" in every country town,
Professing openly with death to wrestle,

Armed with a mortar and a pestle."

' In this estimate of the character of our " Bolus," we are
borne out by the opinions of the burgesses of Lime-street
Ward, who in November last selected the education-doctor
as a companion picture for the ex-quaker ex-member for
Pitt-street ; and never did two cherries grow upon the same
bough, two sparroWs sit upon the same housetop, two geese
sit upon one leg in the same gutter, more worthy to be asso-
ciated together " in ceternum," to be framed and glazed and
hung up " cheek by jowl," than these Siamese twain—this
sweet brace of superlative humbugs. The majority of the
council, however, judged differently; and accordingly alder-
manic honours have been heaped upon the man of pills and
potions, whilst " sweet William " is left to " waste his
sweetness on the desert air." The doctor still presides over
parsing and prosody, writing and arithmetic, cross-stitch,
seaming, and hemming ; whilst the discomfited Socinian is
fain to hide his diminished head under the wing of John
Rosson, and to court the sweet airs which distil from his
associate brood of repealers for his daily meal of popular
applause.

In person Doctor Blackburn is not distinguished by any
superlative graces or comeliness. lie has a hard, dry, utili-
tarian face, and, as a Scotchman would phrase it, limbs " in
conform." Habit him in the garb of a Saxon " navigator"
—not one of that fraternity which " goes down to the sea in
large ships," but of that coarser race of human beings who
go up sewers, sink wells, form railway embankments, or dig
drains ;—pl::ce a pickaxe or a shovel in his hands, and forth-
with all the outward indications of the man of education and
intellect would be lost. You might then aptly apply to him
the description given by William Wordsworth of his pedlar,
Peter Bell :

" There was a hardness in his look,
There was a hardness in his eye,—
As if from setting of his face
Against the wind and sky."

Neither can the attributes of grace or elegance be fairly
applied to the manner of the doctor, as a writer or a speaker.
From a man, in fact, of whose system the essential charac-
teristic is that it flings overboard all the finer feelings of the
human heart—that it deliberately separates itself from reli-
gion, as an essential principle in the constitution of society,
and adheres solely to the assertion of a cold utilitarian theory
which makes the realisation of earthly advantages a primary
object, whilst the achievement of eternal happiness is but of
secondary or subsidiary importance,—it would be vain to
look for either lofty sentiment or refined and graceful lan-
guage. Not a trace of imagination or of feeling—not one
sentence addressed to the fancy or the heart—can be found,
we venture to say, in any written production of Doctor
Blackburn ; and in the few oral addresses which we have
heard him deliver, we cannot rememler that one sentiment
ever issued from his lips which might not have been uttered
by an automaton. In the very " whirlwind of his fury,"
his manner never struck us with any other idea than that, so
happily depicted on one occasion by the Rev. Hugh M'Neile,,
of a man " pounding his adversary's arguments in a mortar."
Such as he is, however, and although, in our humble opi-
nion, far from a favourable specimen of humanity, the doctor
appears, nevertheless, to be a very great man in the estima-
tion of his party ; and, with all due deference to the profes-
sion to which he belongs, we never knew a medical pretender
to " superior lights," thoroughly embued, at the same time,
with the doctrines of " modern liberalism," who was not a
useful man in the eyes of his party, because a ready tool,
possessed of a just admixture of the qualities of the M'Syco-
pliant tribe, with the obduracy of heart and intellect peculiar
to the Malthusian philosopher. Of all pestilent quacks, we
fervently pray to be preserved from the medico-political
quack, who, forsaking his lancet and his gallipots, takes to
bleeding and physicking the body politic. We have no great
predilection for either drastic or purgative, bloodletting or
blistering, as applied to our own proper corpus; we love nei-
ther splinters nor bandages, infusions nor transfusion ; and
we see no pressing reason why one of the tribe who practise
these useful arts, or perform these salutary operations upon
diseased humanity, should be let loose to practise upon the
social machine. That they are very efficient practitioners
we have no doubt—where some principle obnoxious to libe-
ralism is to be eradicated. Of this, indeed, we have had
ample experience in the education-practice of the learned
doctor. But we once remember to have heard one of the
profession speak of " a beautiful ulcer ;" and however bene-
ficial the production of such an interesting phenomenon may
be to the human frame, we have no wish to see either ulcers,
in the shape of Corporation Schools, wens in the form of
Union Workhouses, blisters in the form of O'Connellite agi-
tation, or depletion in the form of free-trade and anti-corn
law nostrums, applied by political doctors to the body politic
of Great Britain. Entertaining such a feeling, we certainly
do not begrudge the whig party the possession of their medi-
cal alderman; but, on the contrary, we do hope most fer-
vently that the time is not far distant when his political prac-
tice will be confined to a narrower sphere, and he will have
sufficient exercise for his gallipots in providing the necessary
emolients, to salve over the wounded vanity of his discom-
fited and discarded fellow-quacks in office.

The political views of the doctor are those of the thorough
whig hack, and his philosophy is of the Scotch school. From
the heart and the head of such a man might be supposed to
emanate the harsher features of the new poor law. In such
a man the workhouse test, the separation of husband and
wife, of parent and child, the limitation of diet to that pre-
cise point at which the satisfaction of the bodily craving ends,
and starvation commences, the contract for cheap physic,
and, last scene of all, the felon burial and the unconsecrated
grave, would find an advocate, who, whilst thus deliberately
resigning the material frame to destruction—whilst thus de-
priving a human being of the privilege of breathing for the
few last hours of his pilgrimage the free air of heaven—would
stickle for the preservation of his rights of conscience, and
esteem it an act of hardship that his last prayer should be
poured out in the presence of the Established Church. Hang,
drown, imprison, starve the poor wretch who is guilty of the
atrocious crime of poverty, if you will ; but philosophy such
as that of our doctor, cannot endure that the dissenting con-
science should be touched, or that the voluntary principle in
religion should be in the least degree impeached.