The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1841-08-20 00:00:00

TO CORRESPONDENTS

The Dumfries Courier of the 16th instant, quotes an article,
headed "When will trade improve", as from the LIVER-
POOL STANDARD. We assure our Scotch readers that we
have never held (except in abhorrence) the sentiments that
our cannie contemporary has attributed to us.
Sufficient has already been said on the subject noticed by
"J P."
If "R H C" will in confidence furnish us with his name,
we shall have something to say to the lecturer whose ob-
servations have caused his animadversions.

Cht Eibtrpoot &tanbarb.

FRIDAY MORNING, AUGUST 20, 1841

We inserted in our last the Mercury's gross calumny
upon this great commercial town so emphatically pnt
forth in these words—viz., " that in this our native
" town, intolerance and the absence of true Christian
" feeling are more disgustingly prominent than in any
" other town in the kingdom, or any part of the world
" with the history of which we are at all acquainted."
That this most foul and calumnious charge is altoge-
ther false and unfounded, anybody who knows any-
thing of the numerous, respectable, and enlightened
inhabitants of Liverpool will most readily admit; and,
for its own sake, we do not attempt the refutation : it
will be sufficient to say a few words touching the source
from which it springs. And, in the first place, it is
the railing of a grievously chagrined, aged, and disap-
pointed Cynic, who, supposing that he had founded a
sect sour and cynical as himself, is sorely amazed to
find that in the hour of need the themes fly from him ;
the pupils whom he had been so long drilling and on
whom he thought he could rely, scatter ; and himself
left alone to roll his tub, or vent his rage like another
Timon

" Let me look back upon thee, 0 thou wall,
That girdlest in those wolves! Dive in the earth,
And fence not Athens ! Matrons, turn incontinent !
Obedience fail in children! * * *
* * * * Plagues incident to men,
Your potent and infectious fevers heap
On Athens, ripe for stroke! Thou cold sciatica,
Cripple our councillors, that their limbs may halt
As lamely as their manners !"

With the defeat of Sir Joshua Walmsley and the
Foreign Secretary Whiggery died a natural death in
Liverpool, and Liberalism is now a worn out, decayed,

and exploded fallacy. Can we be surprised then at the
crackbrain raving of a veteran who piqued himself on
being an adept in the art, and hugged himself in the
imagination that he had thoroughly befooled the world
with its mysteries ? We hear his shrill pipe whiitling
in the wind, and we gather up the Sybil leaves that he
scatters about ; but we catch the echo of the one and
preserve the fragments of the other only as memorials
of impotent rage and detected folly.
He fumes and sputters about "intolerance," as if he
himself did not stand forth a living disproof of the ac-
cusation. No placid horsepond has been disturbed by
the sousing of his person ; no friendly pump has been
wedded to his ears since this saucy impertinence was
uttered ; nay, the niaiseries, lying, and stupidity of his
parte feuille are endured; and yet it is of a town and
people who tolerate so much that this brazen calumni-
ator says, they are " intolerant and unchristian ! "
Why patient and christian endurance so extraordinary
is worthy of being inscribed upon our crest, and will
pass into a proverb.
But we promised to advert to some other portions of
his tirade. And first, he attributes the reverse of for-
tune which his party have sustained in Liverpool, not
to the loathing and disgust which people everywhere
begin to feel to the false teaching and delusions of
Whiggery, but to the influence of the clergy. " Li-
verpool," says the anile railer, " is cursed with the
presence of meddling Irish Orange parsons, who pro-
stitute the pulpit to factious party purposes, and evince
their piety by inciting one portion of the Christian
community to hate and revile the other." Prodigious
preachers and most commanding revolutionisers these
" Irish
Orange Parsons," who could give the Mercury
such long
odds, and beat him soundly at his own game
in so short a
time! How little stamina must there
have been in Liberalism to give way so rapidly, and
sink at once before the invasion of two or three simple,
unattended parsons from Ireland 1 What sort of base
thing, we ask, must the religion or the policy of Libe-
ralism be, that should flee like a coward, or die upon