The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1849-10-09 00:00:00

CHAPTER IX.

The memorial of the merchantsof Liverpool, referred
to in the preceding chapter, was brought up to town,
accompanied by a most influential deputation ; and pre-
sented to the premier and the Chancellor of the Exche-
quer, in the middle of October. The interest attached to it
amongst commercial men in the metropolis, and through-
out the country, was tremendous. The fate of thou-
sands was to be decided by the impression made upon these
functionaries, and the course which they would determine
upon adopting ; and by none was the issue watched with
more tremulous anxiety than by Mr. Mansel and his son.
It was to them an issue of life or death ; of the maintenance
of their commercial reputation and solvency, or the sur-
render of all further struggle against• the difficulties by
which they felt themselves surrounded. A very short
explanation will suffice to convey to the reader an idea of
the exact position of our merchants; and of the circum-
stances under which they indulged at this crisis, in a
temporary gleam of hope, and, this failing them, ultimately
adopted a decisive step.
_ _

Al the period in question, calamity had followed calamity
in the commercial world. Houses previously regarded as
far beyond the reach of danger, had been compelled to suc-
cumb to the universal pressure. The governor of the Bank
of England, in evidence beforethe select committee of 1848,
upon the distress of the country, gave in a list of 33
houses, who had failed up to the end of 1847, with aggre-
gate liabilities amounting to £8,000,000 sterling. Every
foreign mail had brought the news of some fresh disaster
—of some commercial Leviathan laid prostrate in the
dust. In our East Indian dependencies nothing was to be
met with but unparalleled sacrifices of British goods, mo-
netary disarrangement, panic, and insolvency; and not a
market in the world held out the prospect of a favourable
issue for mercantile opi rations. The wretched returns
for investments abroad were so much waste paper, for the
time, in the hands of those who received them. Not a
banker would look at the bills drawn by foreign houses
against the produce forwarded for sale in the British mar-
ket. Many of those houses had been driven into suspen-
sion,—some with undoubted means in their hands for
meeting ultimately all their engagements ; and produce
of every description was unsaleable, except at the most
disastrous sacrifices. The extent of these is strikingly
shown in the following statement, vouched for by the
committee of the Liverpool Currency Reform Associa-
tion, in a letter addressed to the editor of the Morning
Chronicle, dated the 20th December, 1848 :
" For every £lOO the importer or holder of the following
five staple articles had to give, in January 1847, the smaller,
and in October 1847, the larger quantities :
Sovereigns.
100—Sugar .. 59 cwts. in January, 93 cwts. in October.
100—Tea .... 2181 lbs. in January, 3200 lbs. in October.
100—Rum .. 500 galls. in January, 1263 galls. in October.
100—Cotton .3090 lbs. in January, 5189 lbs. in October.
100—1r0n.... 25 tons in January, 44 tons in October."
Every other description of property was equally unsale-
able at anything like its fair value; and securities for
money were only negociable upon the most usurious
terms. Railway debentures, the bonds of public com-
panies, bank stock, and even exchequer-bills, could only
be turned into money by submitting to the loss of a con-
siderable portion of the capital which they represented.
Under these circumstances it is not to be wondered at
that the remaining capital of the Messrs. Mansel had
dwindled away, in the process of conversion into money,
to such an extent as to place the house upon the verge of
insolvency. They were in this position at the period in
question. They held negociable securities, and a few lots
of produce, sufficient in amount, if they could have been
realized, to meet their few outstanding liabilities ; and
William Mansel had steeled his mind to the determina-
tion of following the example of many of the firms which
had already succumbed to the storm, and, in the event of
a dogged course of action being persisted in by the Go-
vernment, and the prayer of the mercantile body being
spurned, of surrendering the management of their affairs
into the hands of trustees, for their creditors.
It was not without many an hour of anxious consulta-
tion—many a searching investigation of their means and
prospects—that this course had decided upon. Even
yet it was regarded by Mr. Mansel himself as the bitter-
est dispensation which could have befallen him. The
pang, however, which in ordinary times the thought of
declared insolvency would have inflicted, had been in
some degree lessened by the examples which the late
calamitous times had afforded on every side. When
the merchant princes of the land—men sitting in the
councils of the Sovereign—reputed millionaires, whom
the world would not have wondered to see elevated to the
highest rank in the social scale—had been compelled to
stoop from their high places, why, he reflected, should
an humble house like his own feel so sensitively at being
involved in the general prostration ? The world, his
conscience told him, could impute no reckless trading—
no wild speculation—no straining to be rich in a day—to
him. He was but the victim of a system ; a sacrifice
upon the altar of the national idol—gold. The widowed
and the orphan could call down no reprobation upon his
head. Their pleadings were addressed to a higher autho-
rity—to the Government of the day—which had insisted
that the mysterious visitation of Providence, the blight
which had fallen upon our fields, should spread desolation
and suffering throughout every region of the globe, in
which British capital and enterprise were embarked. It
was hard to see the fruits of a life of honest striving thus j
ruthlessly swept away—to see them sacrificed to the
maintenance of a crotchet. But the lot was a common
one. It brought with it suffering and privation ; but no
forfeiture of self-respect—no dishonour.
The mercantile reader requires not to be told what was
the response of Government to the memorial in question.
The public were informed that at all hazards " the con-
vertibility of the bank note " must be maintained. In
vain was remonstrance used. In vain was the Chancellor
of the Exchequer warned, by men of the first standing in
the commercial world, that without some concession,
some relaxation of the stringency of the Bank Charter
Act. a general crash must ensue. In vain was it repre-
sented to him that even the slightest movement in the
direction pointed out would at once unshackle commerce
and reassure the mind of the nation. The Government
was stubborn in its determination to keep up the harvest
of usurers, and to sacrifice the commerce and industry of
the country, rather than injure the reputation of the me-
tallic bantling of the Peels and Lloyds of the world ! The
dictum went forth, and the columns of the Gazette shortly
afterwards told the result.
Yet in a very few days from this decision, the Govern-
ment were themselves compelled, with the Bank of Eng-
land, within twenty-four hours of a forced suspension of
payment, to intimate to the community a suspension of
the very law which had beggared thousands ! After hav-
ing been permitted to exact the blood and sinew from the
commercial community—after having run riot in usury,
and enabled the money-lending portion of the world to
glut their appetites for gain upon the hardly-earned
profits of enterprise and industry—the Bank itself was
allowed to substitute its paper promises for that very gold,
which millions of the property and the labour of the com-
munity had been thrown away in the markets of the world
to attract towards our shoresl
It may not be out of place here to give the opinions of
two statesmen, of conflicting politics, upon the process to
which British industry had at this time been submitted.
The first is an apologetic passage from a speech delivered
in Nov., 1847, by the Premier, Lord John Russell :
"I find," said his lordship, "on looking to the returns, that,
in the nine months ending October 10, 1845, the amount of
articles of British and Irish manufactures exported from the
kingdom was £41,732,000 ; that for the same period in 1846, it
was .e 40,800,000, and for the same period in 1847, to ."39,975,000.
This does, to be sure, exhibit a difference, as compared with
the two preceding years, but it is no such falling off as should
inspire any one with despondency, or that, coming after those
prosperous years, it is such a falling off as should dispirit any
one looking to the future for the permanent prosperity of the
country. (Hear.) 1 find that the exports from Liverpool of
British manufactured goods to the United States for the three
quarters ending Oct., 1846, were to the amount of €4,529,585,
and that for the three quarters ending October, 1847, they
amounted to .:6,79l,ooo,—making a difference in favour of ex-
ports this year front Liverpool to the United States, of
£2,261,414. (Hear, hear.) This fact shows us, that according
to the wholesome process of trade and exchanges the food we
imported into this country in greater quantity than usual had
been the cause of greater export of our manufactures."

This very increase, upon Which his lordship congratulated
himself, was simply the effort of the commercial com-
munity to turn the exchanges in favour of Great Britain,
by sacrificing our manufactured goods to bring back our
idolized gold standard. Had the " wholesome process"
mentioned by his lordship taken place, we should have
had no monetary crisis. The second extract is from a
speech delivered by a statesman, now no more,—the late
lamented Lord G. Bentinck—in the same month :

" Within my own knowledge," said his lordship, "during
the last six weeks, some of the merchants and importers of
Liverpool have sold 22,000 bales of cotton at a loss of £8.8,000 ;
and in the year before last, their loss upon the same commo-
dity amounted to £lOO,OOO, thus affording a premium,la bonus,
and a bounty to the foreign manufacturer to come here and
beat the Englishmen in their own market. (Hear, hear.) For
eight years past the stocks of cotton at Liverpool were never
so low as they are at the present time. These gentlemen tell
us that a short cotton crop is the great cause of all the distress.
But what is the spectacle which England presents? Why, that
she is at present the greatest exporting country of raw cotton,
the material of our staple manufacture. Then is it a want of
cotton that has produced this distress? No; is it a want of
credit ? It is your restrictive monetary laws, your cruel Bank
Charter Act; your system, the true object of which we were
let know by the Elbing letter, of endeavouring by anticipation
to correct any too great commercial speculation ; it is your act
of parliament, passed with the view of making things in Eng-
land artificially cheap, so that when, by your free import*, you
have allowed all the gold to pass from the country, because
foreign countries would not take your manufactures in return,
you might then bring back the gold again—this it is that has
produced the distress. (Hear, hear.) You have cotton selling
at ..t4 the bag below the cost price, sugar at 6s. and Si. the
cwt. below the price it was purchased at in Cuba or Brazil; tea
sold by the pound retail at a price less than what it cost the
merchant by the chest in Cantor.. These are the works of your
free-traders, who must bolster up their new-fangled schemes by
means of this Bank Charter Act. lam assured—l speak in
the presence of mill-owners and cotton-spinners, who may
contradict me if they can—that for the first time in the history
of cotton manufactures, calicoes and yarns have been sold at
the price the cotton cost. (Hear, hear.) Do you think that
is a profitable trade for England? (Hear, hear.) It will bring
back the gold, perhaps—it will bring back tke golden image for
the right hon. baronet the member for Tamworth to worship—
but will it benefit the country ?"