The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1846-12-01 00:00:00

THE LIVERPOOL STANDARD.

confidently we believe that he would be the first
man to thank Us for our efforts, were they success-
ful, to afford hitt, along with the position and the
income of a gentleman, that amount of leisure which
a man of his refined tastes and pursuits can turn to
so much advantage and self-satisfaction.

Some grand national system of Education is
doubtless about to occupy the attention of her
Majesty's Whig Government. Be it so. The
schoolmasters par excellence are in office ; and we
must bear, as patiently as we can, an infliction of
pedagogueism. So far as Liverpool 's concerned,
however, we have the fact to console us that our
educational efforts are not eleemosynary, and are
therefore not liable to State interference. We have
only to go on, and, if possible, extend the sphere of
our exertions, and we shall at least be progressing in
the right direction.
We are not at all regardless of the fact, however,
to which a correspondent of the London Times—the
Rev. W. G. Osborne—has recently directed the
notice of the public, that an attention to the duty of
instilling even religious education into the minds of
our juvenile population will not be efficacious, in
producing a greatly improved moral condition of
that population, without an attention also to other
most important measures conducive to that end.
Mere education does, after all, little or nothing.
The adult. and even the convinced, Christian are
liable to fall into error—to be overcome with the
temptations, by which the most favourably-circum-
stanced amongst us are surrounded. The poor,
however, for whom we devise our systems of educa-
tion, have influences amongst them and around
them, against which no mere teaching can protect
them. It is of no avail that we instil into the minds
of their children a knowledge of the saving truths of
religio , whilst we send them home to be submitted
to the contamination with which that home is filled.
It is of little avail that half of their time is passed in
the moral and healthy atmosphere of the well-regu-
lated school-room, whilst the remainder is spent
amidst the squalor and vice which abound in the
neighbourhood of the filthy court, or the crowded
and noxious cellar. We are compelled to confess
—all p rties confess, and the records of our daily
police court prove—that, thus far, education, upon
whatever system conducted, has done little to ad-
vance our rising population in the social scale. The
lessons of the teacher are soon unlearnt. The good
sought to be instilled oozes out too readily beneath
the pressure of the bad example, which the scholar
has continually before his eyes when he has escaped
from the surveillance of the teacher. The vicious,
the careless, or the necessitous parent, undoes all
which we have striven to do, however great the ex-
pense to which we have gone in our efforts, and
however excellent the system upon which those
efforts have been based.

We dignify one committee of our Corporate body
by the title of the " Education Committee." We
have, however, more education committees than one,
in the true sense of the term. The Health Com-
mittee is an education committee. The Watch
Committee is an education committee. The Im-
provement Special Committee comes under the same
category. The physical must go with the moral.
We cannot teach virtue, if we will not allow to our
neophytes the opportunity of practising virtue, or
remove them from the contamination of vice. What
is it to boast of, if, when you have taught a child
that he has a soul, and that there is a Redeemer for
us all, we send him home to learn the sad lesson,
that, practically, so far at leagt as worldly matters
go, that Redeemer has died in vain ; that toil is re-
warded with miserable lodging and scanty food;
that industry lacks its just reward ; that the astute
wicked prosper, whilst the deserving pine and suffer ?
Can we wonder that our time, our money, our
worthy aspirations, have been thrown away ? Our
selfishness has been all along counteracting the
efforts which we have been making, with such show
o: virtue and disinterested zeal, for the welfare of our
fellow human beings.

It is of no use, or of very little use, to persist in
our education schemes, unless we are prepared to
look the whole emergency of our position in the face,
and to act, for the carrying out of our views, like
rational and intelligent men. We must cease to
look at the hoarding of money as the sale object, or
the principal object, ;or which a man lives, or a com-
munity is formed. We must cease to treat our po-
pulation as the mere machines by whom our wealth
is produced. We must get rid of the whole fabric
erected by our modern politico-economical philoso-
phy. It it bad—wretchedly bad—unchristian, and
inhuman. We must recognise our poor fellow
worms in our treatment of them—in our workhouse
and prison regulations—as beings of the same value
in the eyes of their Maker as ourselves; dismiss our
cold-hearted notions, and admit that it is as vitally
necessary that the working man and his children
should be able to subsist in comfort—to approach
the same Throne of Grace—to breathe the same
pure air—to enjoy the same opportnities of health—
in a word, to be in all respects upon something like
the same footing, so far as external and palpable
comforts go, with ourselves. The labourer is worthy
of his hire. He ought also to enjoy the comforts
which that hire will afford. We are not of the
maudlin school of political economists. We have no
wish to paint the rich man as habitually oppressing
the poor; the former as habitually vicious or un-
feeling, or the latter as paragons of virtue. We take
mankind in its every day garb, stript of the melo-
dramatic hue in which it is painted by some people.
We are compelled, however, to confess that, thus
far, we have not done our duty to our weaker
brethren. Education, indeed, we have attempted to
provide for them. But we have surrounded Educa-
tion with counteracting influences. We have ma-
nured ; we have selected our seed ; we have watered
and the sun has shone; but we have neither weeded
nor pruned, nor provided a garner for the produce
of our labour, into which either moth or rust cannot
enter at will. An amendment of our past system
—some atonement for out past shortcomings—we
hope for from the committees we have named. The
Health Committee must do its duties fearlessly. Let
its members not forget that their avocations are as
vitally important in an educational capacity as in the
mere removal of causes of physical disease. From
the Improvement Committee and the Watch Coin-
,
mittee we expect the same proper appreciation of
their duties. A large income is derived from the
public estate of this town. Let no penny-wise mode
of using it be permitted to impede our growth in
honour and respectability as a community. Expend
it freely ; but expend it wisely—not in ornamental
decoration of our town, but in measures which will
secure to our population the blessings of health and
those which attend upon honesty and virtue.
We are not expecting any miraculous changes—

any sudden conversions—to be wrought by any of
these bodies. All that we ask is that their efforts
shall be made in the right direction, and that they

strive to emancipate themselves from the paralyzing
fear, under which they have hitherto been pressed
sown, on the score of the cost of improvements.
We have in this town very many localities which
are acknowledged dens of crime; into which de-
cency never penetrates; and which are unsafe by
cay as well as by night. Let the sun shine upon
forne of these localities. Admit the light and the
fesh air into them, Remove the filthy hovels and
dark courts in which vice skulks to hide from
jt,tice : and erect upon their sites respectable
st,eets for a decent population. It is of little use
educating the children thus herded together in such
ab)des of moral and physical pestilence. With all
ou efforts—with all the vigilance of our police—
these wretched places are only rearing tenants for
our prisons and our hospitals. Our authorities may
take this for an established fact, that there never
will be a moral and a well conducted population in
abdes and localities shut up from the light of day,
and the surveillance of the communi y around
them

Mr. Eyre Evans is well known by his friends to
ertertain a very high opinion of his own abilities
vial respect to matters connected with dock ma-
3agement, combined with no little personal sore-
ness against the gentleman who at present occupies
the position of Chairman of the Dock Committee.
He loses few opportunities, even in private compa-
nies, we are told, of exhibiting these fee ingg. We
were quite prepared, therefore, when a meeting and
a dinner were announced to take place, in celebra-
tion of the worthy gentleman's return for St. Paul's
Ward, to find him entering into a diatribe upon
dock management in general, and giving vent to
one of his customary attacks against Mr. Bramley
Moore in particular. We were scarcely, however,
prepared for so powerful and bitter an effusion as
Mr. Evans delivered himself of upon this occasion
—an effusion which many people think would have
been in much better taste, if delivered in the pre-
sence of the gentlemen, whoever they may be,
against whom the charge which it conveys is di-

rected, by which an opportunity would have been
afforded them of at least asking what was meant. I

For instance, such a question might very pro-
perly have been asked with respect to the following
passage :
;‘ There was an immense Corporate income here, and
there was a very large Dock income also. lf it were only
the expenditure of that income in the town it would have
a very considerable corrupting effect, but it was not con-
fined to that, for they had gone to work with the capital
as well as with the income, and an ambitious man, who
gets into position in Liverpool, either in the Corporation
or Dock Committee, if he wishes to achieve his own ad-
vancement in obtaining civic honours has only to call his
surveyors, get large plans, which he calls improvements,
which will enable him to sweep away houses and ware•
houses, and purchase the lands and other property of a
great number of individuals in the town. All these in-
dividuals, consequently, expect, in a movement of that
sort, to get from thirty to forty per cent. above the value
of their property, and, of coarse, the ambitious man en-
lists on his side a very large number of influential people,
who believe unless they support the party of which he is
the representative, this great and beneficial enterprise will
not be carried into execution. That would account for
much of what had bee❑ done."

Who are the parties, or rather, who is the party,
against whom Mr. Evans means to charge the
heinous conduct of " going to work with the ca-
pital as well as with the income," to " achieve his
own advancement in obtaining civic honours," and
"enlisting on his side numbers of influential people,"
by giving them 30 to 40 per cent. above the value
of their property ? Who is the " ambitious man"
pointed at ? If this is anything more than after
dinner talk, we ought to know who is the criminal.
Mr. Evans talks also of the " Harrington job."
Now there are some parties formerly interested in
that property in the Council, of which Mr. Evans
is a member. Why go behind their backs to throw
out imputations, when he has abundant opportu-
nities of meeting them face to face ? It would be a
more manly proceeding to moot the question, as to
the existence of any jobbing by those parties, in the
Council Chamber, than thus to attack them in after
dinner speeches in hole and corner gatherings.
Mr. Evans takes upon him to complain of the
working so far of the Albert Dock warehouses, and
asks triumphantly, " if men like Mr. Aiktn, Mr.
Mellor, Mr. Holt, Mr. Higgins, and Mr. Benn, had
had the management of this dock up to this hour,
was it to be supposed that there would have been
only two ships in the dock with all the warehouses ?"
What the four latter gentlemen might have accom-
plished we certainly do not know. We never re-
cognized in any of them very strikingly superior
abilities; and it does not appear that the constitu-
encies have. Mr. Aikin is a member of the Dock
Committee still, and as such responsible for the
management of its affairs ; and as we have never
heard much complaint from him on the subject of
the Albert Dock and its warehouses, we presume
matters there are progressing as well as is possible
under all circumstances. Besides it is not very in-
genuous in Mr. Evans to assert that the committee
have "all the warehouses" available. He knows
that they have only two of them.
Alas, alas ! we fear that such railingis but the fruit
of mortified vanity after all. Mr. Evans fears that
the world will discover that "great improvements"
can go on without him ; that the docks of Liver-
pool are not shut up, or the Mersey run dry, not-
withstanding he does not occupy his wonted chair
at the Dock Board. The figure of Britannia has
newer yet fallen from its position on the dome of
the Town-hall, although Mr. Evans has never been
enabled to occupy the civic chair, and to dispense
the hospitalities of the Mayor's table. Let him be
good tempered and wait his turn. When that ap-
proaches, we trust that neither he nor we shall again
have the mortification of finding that the required
seat in the Council itself has been snatched from
him.