The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1840-10-23 00:00:00

MORNING, OCTOBER 23, 1840

rsely blind must be those amongst
. . _
our countrymen who do not recognise the hand of

Stupidly and per

Popery prompting and guiding every political move-
ment of the present day. What is it, we ask, which
he last two sessions of Parliament has main-
most incapable, dishonest, and
to ministry which ever controlled the destinies
? The power of the Roman Catholic
chat has been the ultimate, if not the
great measure for which that
To advance—to strengthen—to

during t

tained in office the

Teat nation

Church

stry has striven ?

.eat Britain the power of that church !

In the court of our sovereign—in the senate and in the
he intrusive foot of Popery has been boldly
In our municipal corporations she has suc-

council

.7eeded in usurping the control of the funds hitherto
levoted to the education of our youth in Protestant

principles. She fills our police, our public offices, and
our schools with her minions. She absorbs the great
lion of our public charities, and is winding her in-
ious coil around the time-hallowed fabric of that
he preservation of which, in its purity,
heir blood in the field and at the
She surrounds with her priesthood the dying

s shed t

of our ancient gentry, and, day by day, some
prop'rty falls into their grasp, to be devoted to
urpose of raising up anew that blighting super-
-1 which has been, throughout the ages of its ex-

a cur

e and a plague to mankind

Popery has been silently but unceasingly
ng for the promotion of her ambitious designs,
hich she possesses has defeated and
The sway which her priesthood
naintain over the ignorant and enslaved constituencies
)f Irelaw' has enabled her to dictate terms to her op-
ponents within the walls of the British House of
Commons—to prescribe limits to our once boasted
Protestant ascendancy ; and she now seeks to extend

power

opposition

r a portion of the constituencies of Eng-

It is well known that for the last twenty years a
constant stream of immigration has been pouring from
the wilds and bogs of Ireland into the manufacturing
districts of Great Britain. In Liverpool, Manchester,

vhole of the populous manufacturing towns
upon most of which the reform bill conferred

irst time the privilege of returning members to
House of Commons—the Irish Roman Catholic
long constituted the bulk of the lower
classes of the popula ion. From these men, unorgan-
ized as they have hitherto been—removed but one de-
gree from pauperism, and, from their improvident
habits, unable to acquire a sufficient qualification to
entitle them to-vote for members of Parliament, or at
municipal elections—the utmost exertions of the Whig
party were never able to glean more than a very feeble
and precarious support.

inhabitants have

But the aspiring spirit and the persevering energy
of Popery can achieve a victory over obstacles, from
which the feeble and contemptible efforts of whig radi-
calism would recoil in despair. A class of men, which
to the latter presented only the spectacle of individuals
swayed by no steady impulses, and capable of no poli-
tical organization, is susceptible of being moulded by
the plastic fingers of Popery into an engine sufficiently
powerful to operate upon the representation of Great
Britain, to an extent which a mere whig would never
even have dreamt of. For the purposes of Popery it
was sufficient that the Roman Catholics of our large
towns were servants of " the Church ;" it was suffi-
cient for her that the materials were there in abun-
dance. She wanted only men, and she doubted not
her power to make them docile, humble, and ready
agents to the work which she had in contemplation.

Our Liverpool readers have witnessed the energy
and perseverance with which her priesthood have la-
boured to achieve that work—the creation of an over-
riding, majority of Roman Catholic voters upon our
municipal and borough registers. But they are not to
suppose that the attempt has been confined to our own
town. In Manchester,
Preston, Bolton, Stockport—
wherever, in fact, large bodies of Papists are herded
together—wherever the influence of the mass-house
and the confessional extends—the same struggle has
taken place, attended by varied degrees of success.
The attack has not been a mere desultory effort to
achieve some petty triumph ;—the object has been one