The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1847-01-19 00:00:00

tive colors only to betray thein. The
nation would make the one powerles
make the other dangerou

" (Signed on behalf of the Protestant Committee,)
" HUGH STOWELL, President."
His lordship is opposed to a ten hours' bill, and
thinks that millowners and their operatives could
come to an arrangement amongst themselves. His
arguments upon this question are of the thorough
free-trade sort, and will serve him with the employers
of labour, although not with the employed. Upon
the other topics remarked upon in the speech, and
in reply to the numerous questions put to him, his
lordship expressed the usual opinions entertained
by the Conservative party. Upon Irish' policy,
however, he sails as steadily in Daniel O'Connell's
wake as that gentleman could desire. He is for
granting to Ireland "an equality of civil rights,"
which, of course, means the more complete transfer
of all corporate and other power into the hands of
the Popish faction ; and intends trying to put down
discord and sedition there by " depriving" the
disturbers of " any excuse for such conduct !"
The old tale. The genuine Peel policy. Give a
sop to the seditious, coax him, flatter his vanity or
his avarice, in order to convert him into a good
subject. But the loyal man—the quiet and orderly
subject--what of him ? He is disregarded, and
perhaps visited with " heavy blows and great
discouragement," because he is loyal, quiet, and
orderly. Lord Lincoln's plan of pdtting down
sedition is much the same as putting down bur-
glary by leaving your goods and chattels iii the
front of your premises, in order to deprive the
burglar of " any excuse" for breaking your door
open to get them.

-On the whole, the impression made by his
lordship upon the constituency is said to have been
a most favourable one ; but we must confess that
our opinion of his chance of being returned is not
advanced greatly by it. Lord Lincoln is too much
a mere 'Whig to create any very deep attachment
towards him in the minds of the mass of the
Conservative party, especially those of the middle
and. operative classes ; and the aristocratic Whigs
of Manchester can do little without their own
operatives and middle classes, who are, apparently,
admirers of the Rochdale Quaker.

A MOST important meeting of the peers, repre-
sentatives, and gentry of Ireland was held in
Dublin on Thursday last, the result of which, and
of the feeling which it proves to have been excited
in the minds of our Hibernian fellow-countrymen
by their present disastrous position, will, we trust,
lead to measures of rational and practical improve-
ment of the social condition of the population.
For years—nay, for centuries past, Ireland has been
distracted by her contending factions. Her people
have been afflicted with all the evils of feudalism,
whilst they have enjoyed none of the solid comforts
which that system, in countries differently situated,
has produced. The dependence of her poor upon
the owners of the soil for protection or support has
been a mere figment. Her middle classes, con-
sisting of an unnatural body, holding a position
between the owners of the soil and the poor, have
intercepted the benefits derivable by each from the
just connexion which exists in other countries
between the two extremities of the social fabric,
draining and impoverishing both, reducing the
landowner and the noble to a condition little short
of permanent insolvency, and crushing the small
farmer and the peasant into one which is scarcely
a remove from pauptrism. Religious strife has
furnished another ingredient in the bitter potion of
ill which Ireland has had to swallow ; and agrarian
disturbance, superstition, ignorance, and the indo-
lence of her people, partly constitutional and partly
arising from the absence of all encouragement to
continuous industry, have filled up the number of
instrumentalities by which her sum of misery has
at length become too great for endurance.
The object of this gathering of her landowners
and leading members of parliament, and the tem-
porary fusion of all differences, religious and poli-
tical, which appears to have been satisfactorily
accomplished, is to direct the energies of the intel-
ligence and property of the nation to some effort,
in the first place-, to overcome .the dangers of the
present crisis, and in the next, to provide for the
permanent elevation of the Irish character and of
the social condition of the Irish people. The land-
lord class see before them, as the result of continued
neglect of their duties and continued dissension,
the confiscation of their property in the soil and
the depopulation of the country by famine. The
measures of the Imperial Parliament to meet the
evils of the present crisis, necessarily hasty and
doubtless ill-judged, they see are improvident,
wasteful, and inefficient for the achievement of the
objects in view; and at length the necessity of an
attempt to help themselves is forced upon them.
Some men would have seen all this long ago, and
acted with promptness upon their convictions.
"Better late than never," however, is a wise maxim ;
although "A stitch in time" is a more homely
and a more wise one. We shall not complain,
however, that Ireland's nobility and gentry are late
in their efforts, if they are henceforth persevering
and in earnest.

•
The proceedings of the meeting throughout are
most creditable, although we could have spared
Mr. O'Connell's furious abuse of the London Times
and other members of the British press. Men, in-
formed at the last hour of their duties, ought not
to find fault with those who have for years been
dinning those duties into their ears. Had the no-