The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1846-03-17 00:00:00

TO CORRESPONDENTS.

."A Churchman " is not likely to see the speedy realization of
his wishes. We'belleve that by the act of parliament the Rev.
C. Wray is now :he sole incumbent of St. Martin's Church,
but £:01 1,-er annum is allotted for the payment of a curate.
We are requested to say that it was never contemplated to pro-
duce at Astley's Amphitheatre any such scenic representation
of the recent conflicts in India, as has been announced In
some of the papers.
Cuero L'S Dtscovsnv.—The Mercury of Friday contains a para-
graph hea,ied " A deceased potatoe producing new potatoes
inside." This curious fact in natural history, we learn, was
discovered at a post mor tem examination. held at the Mercury
office, and nut as erroneously stated in the paragraph it-elf,
our contemporary being the anatomist. Nothing, we believe.
• transpired to account for the sudden death of the unfortunate
potatoe, which is st II enve►oped in mystery. The new pota-
toes discove,ed are said to be lively fellows, and the disco.
very is creating a great sensation amongst the deal rs in St.
John's market, who look forward to a c.•nsiderable reduction
in " es, lies." provided only some safe and efficacious mode
of Meat) tion can be hit upon. by wliich the young innocents
may in future be uslosed into the world without canal !g the
decease of the unto t mate mothers.
We are obliged to our kind correspondent near Holywell. The
quotation in our share list of the Royal Bank is quite correct.
Fie is probably not a.Tare that the shares were fixed originally
at £lOOO, but of cotn•se the whole amount has not been paid
up. •

Ebr itibrrpool (ttanDarl3.

TUESDAY MOaNING, MARCH 17, 1846

Our advices from the United States, owing to the

,ztpn7arrival at Boston of the mails from the South,

in time for the sailing of the steamer, are very im-
perfect, the usual files not having came to hand.
Their tine, however, is upon the whole of a more
pacific character than that which we have observed
-in previous arrivals. Although the proceedings in
Congress, upon the Oregon question still exhibit a
plentiful amount of those " Words full of sound
and fury," in which our transatlantic brother is fond
of indulging, we are now more than ever convinced
that, when the time of action arrives, and the Go-
vernment and the people of Great Britain are seen
to be in earnest, they will be found to have partaken
of the character described by the poet—" signifying
nothing." Even in the senate, it is broadly admit-
ted that the cause, if determined upon, of giving the
twelve months' notice to terminate the joint occupa-
tion, must be viewed by Great Britain as precluding
the possibility of an amicable settlement of all ques-
tions at issue by negotiation; and it is not difficult
to perceive that the more sober-minded of the sena-

-tors are beginning to discuss the great disparity in
the present capabilities of the two countries to sus-
tain a hostile collision. On the lgth ultimo we find
Mr. Dix, a senator from New York remarking that—

tt If war should arise he would deprecate that fatal
weakness of underrating the strength of our adversary.
She was ri.Ater in a better condition for war than now.
From her inordinate and over-distended expansion, she
contained within herself the vital principle of weakness,
from which she must ultimately fall to pieces ; but as yet
the British empire exhibited no decisive symptoms of
decay. The senator from Ohio had graphically described
the inordinate burdens imposed upon her subjects, the in-
ternal elements of discord ; but these would scarcely res-
train her where her rights. as she conceived, were invaded.
Look at her soldiery. They are not like those of Rome
in her bloat,d distensi-on of power—enervated, idle, and
luxurious. No, sir. Trey arc to be found in all quarters
of the globe—under the torrid sun of the equator, and
amid the eternal winter of the arctic circle, resisting all
opposition, of the nations, and of the elements. Yet war
may be near at hand. And we should remember that the
last struzde of the stronz man is always the most despe-
rat:t, and almost without exceptkn the most dangerous to
his adversary."
And, although, in deference, perhaps, to the vanity
of his fellow-countrymen, he states the condition of
the defences of their coast as by no means weak, it
is clear that he is not very deeply impressed with a
favourable opinion of his country's chance of suc-
oess in such a strugt4le as that to which hotheaded
and thoughtless blusterers would willingly impel her.
The firmest guarantee of peace, however, we find
in the returning good sense of the American people.
The announcement of our new commercial policy
appears to have awakened the calculating cupidity
of brother Jonathan. He sees in prospect a vast
field of profitable commerce opened to the American
agriculturist, merchant, and shipowner. Already
Le sees the settler of the western states enjoying
the markets, hitherto enjoyed almost exclusively by
the British farmer; and the ports upon the Ameri-
can seaboard filled with its shipping destined for
British ports. Oregon may be a tempting bait for
the squatting population of the back woods to blus-
ter for. It may be a taking theme for party to
dilate upon. It may make a political fortune for a
presidential candidate, or an aspirant to place and
pay. But the god which the American worships is
dollars. There are dollars to be picked up in the
cultivation of friendly relations with Great Britain,
under her free trade policy; and our lately irascible
brother will lay aside for a while his visions of nau-
tical aggrandizement, to enjoy, so long as it is af-
forded to him, the harvest which we are offering for
his acceptance. Negociation, will settle all our dif-
ferences, unless, indeed, Ainetica presumes more
upon our forbearance than Great Britain can endure
—a piece of hardihood and folly which we scarcely
think it will venture upon.

The task of alleviating the real distress of Ireland
appears likely to be as difficult as the present and
half a dozen previous administrations have found
that of removing her imaginary grievances. If we
tie the hands of her unruly peasantry, and restrain
them from murdering their landlords, or one another,
we are assailed with complaints of " coercion " If,
on the other hand, we give full toleration to the
national pastime—allow here a landlord to lie shot,
and there an agent to he bludgeoned—if justice
stands idly by whilst lawlessness covers the face of
the land, and the usual result of the insecurity of
life and property ensues ; we are overwhelmed with
denunciations of the evils of absenteeism, and the
hardship of allowing proprietors of the soil to spend
their incomes in countries where they can go to bed
at night with the tolerable assurance of rising in the
morning without the discgreeable accident of a bullet,
or half a dozen slugs, finding their way through the
window shutters. Coax disaffection and wink at
turbulence, and forthwith we are twitted with
cowardice ; repress or punish them, and we are
accused of tyranny.
The proceedings of the House of Commons, on
Friday night, were reiieved of a portion of their
tedium by an exhibition of this unreasonableness of
the Irish temper, the occasion of which was a motion
by Sir James Graham for leave to make provision
for the treatment of destitute persons afflicted with
- fever in that country. The Right Hon. Secretary
stated that almost in every county in Ireland, and
in various localities throughout those different
Counties, fever, in many cases to a formidable ex-
tent, had made its appearance, the result of distress,
insufficient food, and deficient sanitary regulations.
To meet, and if possible alleviate, this calamity, he
proposed the establishment of a board of health for
the entire country, and the appointment of a medical
officer in every union, to he paid at the public ex-
pense. He also asked for permission for the Boards
of Guardians to provide fever hospitals, and to take
such other steps as were advisable and necessary,
in the case of a populotion incapable, from their
poverty, of assiAing thenyzelve3. If ever titer: was
a question upon which Irish members could meet
their British fellow-legislators in amity, and without
the infusion into it of national bitterness, here, one

would imagine, was such question. If ever there
was an opportunity presented for doing ju-itice to
the provident care of the British Parliament for
Irish suffering, here was such an opportunity.
Such, however, was not the light in which the
occasion was regarded by Mr. Smith O'Brien, who,
after six weeks' utter neglect of his legislative
duties,—six weeks devoted to declamation in Con-
ciliation Hall whilst his abused fellow-countrymen
were demanding his services in Parliament to aid
in warding off from them impending suffering and
want,—bas at length made his appearance in the
House of Commons. With one breath this genuine
Hibernian told the house that "one hundred thou-
sand of his fellow-crewures in Ireland were famish-
ing," and with the next he repudiated the generosity
of British legislature and the British people.
He considered that the Irish people, and amongst
them, of course, the hundred thousand who were

famishing, "could provide for the calamity, with
which they were visited, out of the national re-
sources of Ireland." He would "compel the Irish
landlords to return home, and do their duty to the
people." He would give compensation to tenants
who had expended capital upon improvements of
their farms. He would do any tiling, in fact, to
avoid the disagreeable necessity of acknowledging
that any thing good or kind towards Ireland could
come from British hands, or of allowing the duped
people of Ireland to see that, whilst the treacherous
demagogues whom they trust have been vapovring
in Conciliation Hall, and draining their pockets
weekly for the purposes of an insane agitation,
British Ministers and a British Parliament have
• been sedulously tracing out their real wants and
• sufferings, and devising measures for their removal.
We cannot even give this wrongheaded gentleman 1

the credit of uttering common sense in the support
of his views—
" What be said was," he explained, " that whereas Par-
liament had granted only £lOO,OOO to Irelan,'.—for the
rest were only loans—he, on the part of Ireland, declared
that if they would pass a law against the absentees, who
were drawing away £4,000,000 cr £5,000,000 a year in
exports of corn and exports of cattle, of pigs, and of bacon,
—if they would give back to Ireland these £4,000,000 or
.£5,000,00, the Irish would allow the whole £lOO,OOO to
remain untouched."

We can assure Mr. O'Brien, "on the part of Eng-
land," that there is not the slightest objection against
his fellow- countrymen having back again every
quarter of corn, every sheep, pig, or firkin of butter,
or their equivalent, which these four or five millions
represent. Ireland has simply to refund the money
paid for them—some of which may possibly have
found its way into the pocket of the hon. member
himself—and the transaction can easily be closed.
But to give back the commodities, whilst Ireland
and Mr. Smith O'Brien, her champion, retain the
cash, is scarcely awmode of doing business which
ought to be expected. Badinage apart, is it not
melancholy that in this advanced stage of the nine-
teenth century, a man can be found, occupying the
station of a member of the British legislature, who
thus gravely propounds it as a grievance to his own
country that another country buys yearly four to
five millions of its produce ? We shall have some
of the half-clad weavers of Manchester next, attri-
buting their want of good shirts and jackets to the
circumstance that America or China " draws off "
from this country four or five millions of pieces of
calico ; or Lancashire praying for an absentee tax
to prevent her merchants spending their money in
Birkenhead or New Brighton.

We are glad to find that the observations in our
last, and the quotations which we gave from the
letters of Mr. Isaac Buchanan, with respect to the
effect of the present measures of Government upon
the prosperity and continued connexion of the
colonies of Great Britain with the mother country,
have attracted attention in influential quarters, and
awakened not a few persons from their utopian
visions to a sense of their dangerous and destructive
tendency. Amongst a number of our contemporaries,
we observe that the London Standard, the Sheield
Mercury, the Gloucestershire Chronicle, the Maccles-
field Courier, and others, have taken up the subject
in the same light in which we placed it before our
readers; and amongst some of our most influential
merchants connected with the colonial trade in Li-
verpool, Manchester, Glasgow, and other seats of
commerce, who have been all along warm admirers
of the theory of Free Trade, we have reason to know
that serious misgivings are beginning to be felt.
We hear of one house, having extensive establish-
ments in the Canadas, the partners of which are
seriously meditating the abandonment of those
establishments, in the event of the Ministerial mea-
sures being carried ; and some of our leading
manufacturing and commercial firms in this country,
who have hitherto maintained a profitable business
intercourse with these valuable possessions, look
forward with most gloomy anticipations to the
prospect which is now before them. It appears to
be now a generally admitted fact that the with-
drawal of protection from the corn of Canada will
operate as a fatal blow against the prosperity of that
colony; that such withdrawal, so shortly after the
great compact contained in the Canada Corn Bill
of 1842, upon the faith of which a large expenditure
of money has been applied to the improvement of
the internal navigation of the country, will be re-
garded by the people of Canada as not only in-
jurious but insulting, and that ultimately, and at no
distant period, the course which we are pursuing
must inevitably be productive of an amount of
bitterness of feeling towards Great Britain, which
must cause the disruption of the tie by which she
holds at present that most valuable possession.
It is no doubt true that there are some people
who may be disposed to shut their eyes to the ex-
treme probability—we may say the certainty —of
this calamity. They have made up their minds
that such magnificent results are to arise from the
carrying out their pet theory of Free Trade, to Great
Britain, and to themselves in particular, that they
cannot believe in the possibility of its failure to
benefit every portion and every Interest of our ex-
tended empire. They see as the result of the
measures of government an expansion of the gross
amount of our exports; but they are resolved not
to see, either the possibility of a violent evulsion, or
the certainty that grievous and fatal injury to cer-
tain interests must ensue. We propose to address
a few remarks to this class of selfish or giddy
dreamers.

It will not be denied, we think, that the Canadian
market has been, and is, one at least of the most
important markets which the British manufacturer
and the British merchant possesses. It is valuable
as partaking more than any other of the character
of that best of all markets, the home market. Our
exports thither, we believe, contain, relatively to
extent, a greater amount of skilled labour, and thus
contribute more to the support of the national in-
dustry, than the exports to any other quarter of the
globe. It is, moreover, a market whose capability
of increase is only restricted by the boundless capa-
bility of the soil to feed and afford homes for the
industry of the human race. Its commerce em-
ployed almost exclusively, and would continue to
employ, British shipping and British seamen. Its
population consumed exclusively, and would conti-
nue to consume, British products. It afforded
almost limitless fields for the profitable employment
of British capital, and the means of comfort and
ultimate affluence for increasing millions of the Bri-
tish race. There was, and would continue to exist,
between its hardy and enterprising population and
our own, a community of habits and feeling, and a
community of loyalty. Canada is happily planted,
too, as a check upon the grasping policy of the
United States. It affords us a powerful point d'
appui from our communication with the entire
western continent. In peace it is the most fertile
source of the prosperity of our transatlantic com-
merce, and in war it would furnish us, as it has
furnished us in past seasons of trial and danger,
with an invaluably source of safety and of strength.
We may go further; however, than this. Com-
mercially, it affords us the most powerful lever with
which to effect the gradual breaking down of the
prohibitory fiscal policy of the United States. With
a land boundary, from the River St. Lawrence at
Montreal to the mouth of the Columbia River, ex-
tending about three thousand miles, it is utterly
impossible that the United States can long maintain
intact its present high rates of duty. The proximity
of Canada, which admits the manufactured and
other products of Great Britain at nominal duties,
is clearly incompatible, even at present, with the
preservation, by America, of the customs upon pro-
ducts consumed along this frontier; and, with the
improvements going on in the inland communica-
tions of our own colony such preservation will
sho:tly become an impossibility, except by the aid
of such a vast preventive force as no gover. ment
cmid aflbrd, or would be absurd enough to make
the attempt to support.

These provinces, so productive of profit to Great
Britain as a manufacturing and commercial nation,
so valuable as affording employment to our industri-
ous and hardy emigrants, and furnishing us, as they
do, whh a check against the grasping policy of the
United States, both political and fiscal, we are about
to alienate. We may be told, however, that they
will still remain extensive consumers of the products
of this country. How this can he we must confess
our inability to perceive. The League will, no
doubt, tell us that the British manufacturer will
still be able to command their markets, by the
greater cheapness of Britidh goods. LA us see
how this will be.

We ship now to Canada large Quantities of heavy
cottons, coarse woollens, and linens. The imperial
duty upon the first is, by the tariff now before the
house, 10 per cent.. ad valorem, upon the second
and third 15 per cent. The provincial duty, which
British goods pay only, is 5 per cent. We have,
therefore, a protection on the first of 10 per cent.,
and upon the other two commodities 15 per cent.
Now, it is utterly impossible that, with no imperial
duty to protect our trade—and Canada will scarcely
continue such protection after we have taken from
her the equivalent protection in our own market—
this country will be able to command the trade in
any of these three classes of manufactures, America
beats us now in the South American and Eastern
markets in the article of heavy cottons ' • her coarse
woollens will be preferred to ours in the Canadian
market, and Germany will take her trade in the
heavier fabrics of linen—France, perhaps, in the
finer fabrics. We could go through the list of
articles enumerated in the tariff, and show that the
hosiery of Saxony, the cutlery of Germany, the silk
goods of France, &c.—all of which run us close,
andin some instances beat us in neutral markets—
must supersede us in the Canadian market. This,

moreover, is presuming that Canada, .throwing off
our connexion, seeks no other. The case is mate-
rially aggravated if, as is most natural and probable,
she should throw herself into the hands of the
United States.

But supposing, even, that she adopts none of
these courses ; that she clings still, for a while, to
the British connexion ; where, we ask, is her value
to us after she has lost her consuming power by the
destruction of her agricultural prosperity. A people,
who have nothing which they ca profitably sell,
cannot afford to buy. It is an axiom of the Free
Traders' own philosophy, that a nation can
only consume foreign products to the amount
of its surplus after the supply of its own
wants. If that surplus is five millions, with wheat
at 50s. per quarter, it must be materially less with
wheat at 405.; and ultimately Canada may not find
it worth while, or be able, to have any surplus at all
from this source.

Our limited space prevents us, at present, going
further into the subject and noticing another of its
most important features. We shall, however, have
further opportunity. It is one of vast importance
to the British nation, and ought to receive an im-
partial consideration before any fatal step is re-
solved upon.