The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1841-04-23 00:00:00

grio contidetOy aq to net ttilon It required thought, and the
bulk of mankind'were so mechanically engaged in the routine

of their daily and accustomed business, that
stimulus of more than ordinary power to make them filial
A degree of thought was of course necessary for the accom-
pii,hinent of their daily busines,, but a much more enlarged

wired a

and comprehensive sagacity was required to enable men to
detect, and detecting to remedy, the fundamental evils which
formed part and parcel of the system under which they
lived. (Hear, hear.)

To follow foolish precedent, and to wink
With both eyes is easier than to think.

So said one of our poets in an age not so celebrated for
thinking as the present, but the saying had not lost
its application now. We lived in what was called a
thinking age—when every subject was agitated, and when
the needful stimulus was applied to men's minds to cause
them to consider not only the antiquity but the reason of
existing customs. Happy would it be for us, and our children
afterwards, if, during this inquiry, the high, unchanged, and
eternal difference between right and wrong was observed, as it
stood revealed in the word of the living God, and kept in
view as the regulating standard for mankind. (Hear, hear.)
Otherwise without a regulating standard the human mind was
so naturally vagrant, and the human heart so naturally deceit-
ful, that men in the progress of social improvement, and in the
eager pursuit of it, might rush headlong into the midst of wild
and disastrous experiment. Changes from proved abuses
were duties ; but wisdom, discretion, judgment, forbearance,
patience, and a consideration of the various collateral inter-
ests involved were necessary to make those ckanges im-
provements ; for it was not every change that could
be dignified with the name of improvement. The change
they proposed on the present occasion they thought
would be an improvement, and they adopted this course
in aiming at the cha
might be fairly and

;e, in order that the merits of the cas,
fficiently evaniinerl_ The feels of th,

case—some of them—had been already briefly laid before
the public from the paper which Mr. Hodgson had read.
The parties concerned were a numerous class; the assist-
ants in shops in this town, together with the porters and
messengers connected with those shops, amounted to no
smaller number than 15,000 persons. He had had sup-
plied to him a statistical account, which he had no doubt
contained as great an approximation to the truth and to the
real state of the case, as statistical accounts generally did.
This account estimated the number of drapers' shops in this
town at 250—the average number of assistants employed in
those shops was eight, making a total number of assistants
employed in drapers' shops at 2,000 persons ; the number of
grocers' shops in the town was live hundred—the average
number of assistants employed in each two, making the
number of assistants in grocers' shops 1000 ; the number
of provision shops in Liverpool was 500—the average num-
ber of assistants employed in each 2, making the gross num-
ber of assistants 1000 ; of chemists and druggists there were
150—the average number of assistants employed in each 2,
making 300 in all ; boot and shoemakers there were 612—
the average number of assistants 11, or 3 to two shops, mak-
ing 918; and so the list went on showing that the aggregate
number of 9000 were actually employed as assistants in shops.
To these there were to be added porters and errand boys—
an average allowance of 13 to each shop, which would give
6009, or altogether about 15,000 persons. Now, with regard
to those in the shops, the meeting had already heard, from
the paper read by Mr. Hodgson, that they were required
to be in attendance fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, and in some