The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1840-01-21 00:00:00

CONTEMPORARY PRESS.

CORN
.LAW AGITATION.
' (From the Staffordshire Gazette.)
The agitation of the Manchester mighty corn-law
" league," although wound up on the 13th by a " grand
banquet," turns out this year, as it did last, a complete
failure ; the spouting emissaries who had been sent to
raise the country, having been either scouted or beaten
down by argument at the various meetings which have
been held; and this, princ;pally by men of the working
classes, who have not yet forgotten how completely they
were made tools of, by the same parties, at the time of
the reform mania.
Whether we look at the notable list advertised in the
Manchester papers, of president, vice-presidents, and
stewards, and composed chiefly of Socinians and other
dissenters from the church—all notoriously hostile to
the established institutions of the country--or to the
destructive character of the . whig-radical members of
parliament expected at the feed—twenty-seven in num-
ber, with O'Connell at their head : or to the absence
of all the first-rate merchants, and all' the first-rate
commercial friends and professional men ; there can
be no doubt as to the object of these second-rate cot-
ton brawlers, always the most tyrannical and grinding
with their workpeople. The object is no other than to
pull down the landowners as the steady supporters of
the church and the constitution, and the true friends of
the lower classes ; and with them, the wages of their
workmen. Now, as the members of this trickery
" league," and the M.P.'s, who were invited to the
dinner, are to a man advocates of the poor law, and of
the free trade folly, which admits indiscriminately the
cheap manufactured articles of other countries without
compelling them to take our manufactures in return—
and are, besides, the notorious supporters of the
wretched government which so grievously afflicts the
nation, we seriously advise the working classes in this
county, both agricultural and commercial, to be well on
their guard how they lend their assistance, against their
own interests, to a set of second-rate cotton manufac-
turers of Manchester, who, under the pretence of cheap
corn, would soon reduce their wages, as they have al-
ready reduced the wages of the poor hand-loom weav-
ers of Lancashire : viz., to the starvation point. It is
well known to all the great leading merchants of Man-
chester, and to most of these corn " leaguers" too, that
all the great corn-growing countries of the continent
are, since the war, become great manufacturing rivals,
and do not, therefore, want our goods ;—that they are
many of them sellers instead of buyers, exemplified in
a manner which has made the most sceptical no longer
doubt; by the extraordinary circumstance, that during
the six months of last year, when such an amazing
importation of wheat took place, at the low duty of Is.
and 2s. 6d. a quarter, there was never known so few
orders either for cotton twist or cotton goods for those
countries from which the corn was sent. It is also
well known, that Prussia, which is at the head of these
manufacturing states, has been permitted to place new
duties twice upon British goods, at the very moment
when the sapient ex-member of these' " leaguers"
(Poulett Thompson) reduced the duties on Prussian
hemp and flax; and that the German Commercial
League, instituted for the sole purpose of excluding
our manufactures, has been permitted to embrace eight
German states, without any attempt being made by a
whig government to arrest its progress.
It is alsq known that eight millions of sovereigns
have been sent out of England to these states, for corn,
without their having taken British goods in exchange—
a sum which, had it been spent amongst our own far
mers, would at this moment have been circulating
amongst our unemployed work-people, instead of af-
fording additional means of rivalry to the work-people
of the continent. It is known too, that two millions
are annually abstracted from the comforts of the work-
ing classes, under the name of free-trade, to pay France,
which takes nothing but machinery in return, (in the
face of existing laws against its exportation,) for silks,
gloves, shoes, china, cambric, jewellery and millinery,
wines, &c.; and this, after an experiment of fifteen
years, during which the silk and glove trades have been
destroyed, and the wages of British labour brought
down to the French standard, at which no Englishman
either can or ought to live. We have no time to follow
the subject of free trade, which we have been led into,
at greater length at present; but we cannot help men-
tioning as a sample of what our fellow townsmen may
in their turn expect from it bye and bye, if the system
be persevered in much longer. We saw in the chief
organ of the Corn " League' Gentry,—the Manchester
Guardian of the Ist inst., an advertisement, stating
that a.depot had been opened at No. 27, King-street,
Manchester, for the sale of Ladies and Gentlemen's
French boots and shoes,—Gentlemen's Wellington
boots, at 21s. a pair; shoes no doubt as low in pro-
portion.