The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1847-12-28 00:00:00

TO CORRESPONDENTS;

does npt require any new act of the legislature for the rein)•
positioh of the duties on corn in March next. The scale o
duties can, however, only be continued for eleven months

viz., until February 1849
We do not altogether agree with " a shareholder
off in the receipts of the London and North Western Railway
as compared with last year," is any cause of despondency,
although there are now thirty miles more of road. It would
be wonderful if, during the present commercial gloom, the

that a " fallin

fact was otherwise thin our- correspondent states. Then
must necessarily be much less both of passenger and good:
traffic, andwe think quite sufficient to account for a varia,
tion in the weekly receipts of 46'1,000.
sorry to find that a paragraph in one of our reeenl
:rs appeared to cast an invidious reflection on the
of Mr. Hughes, the celebrated equestrian. Thougl
f course a humble birth casts no diarredtt on a man, yet m
End that the parents of Mr. Hughes were not only respi eta
ble, but possessed of wealth and influence.

as the subject has bee
rulents, it may be as we

on Tuesday

ct to in the proceedin,
st, is not Dr. Brett, the cele

fit of the Royil Inst

mth who obtained the
a Institution, Was " W

st historical prize at the Colle
Harper," not iLW.E. Harder,'

o doubt Dr. Hampden will be elected Bishop of Hereford t(
day, but should the chapter refuse, the Queen will appoir
Dr. Hampden to the vacant see, and whether the cathedr
anthoriti(

?unities of prcemunire
urnal, a paper atrengil
"the memorial to thi
who in writing of him

ttached to tt

,n emanated from the dean Mon
Lses the first person plural."
.ar that the whole of the chant,

However this nifty be, i
r were not with him, fo

re have seen the name of Lord S_
anon of Hereford, appended to t

by 400 members of convocation), deprecating the oppOsitior
to Dr. Hampden. It is rumoured that the Dean will absent
himself to-day from the chapter meeting, thus throwing upor
the canons the responsibility of electing or rejecting Dr
Hampden. The Church and State Gazette states that the
Dean's petition to her majesty was previously rejected by the
chapter by a majority of seven to three.
Ire Mercury of Tuesday last dooms a lad who bad committee

murder to-a
life of ignominy and oil.
A Publican of Liverpool" cannot expect us to give publicity
to his serious charges on anonymous authority.

ET): irLibtrpool gPtanbarti.

Yearly Subscription

Advance, 15s.

On Credit, 17s.

TUESDA}

MORNING,

DEC. 28, 1847

Wt are about to take leave of a year

which has

been one of the most eventful to the commercial
and trading classes of the community of any
within our memory. To all it has been one of
anxiety and suffering ; and to but too many it has
brought ruin. It has melted down colossal for-
tunes to a mere competency ; it has shattered
mercantile establishments, which had been regarded
as impervious to any shocks which could by pos-
sibility be levelled against them ; it has swept
remorselessly away the fruits of years of well-
directed enterprise and strict probity and care;
and reduced the merchant prince, the tradesman,
and the shopkeeper alike to but one grade above
the condition from which they set out in the
morning of their days upon the world's arena, and
some even to a grade lower. Hundreds who en-
tered upon this year in the possession of means to
provide every comfort and luxury of life,- find
themselves at its close doomed to struggle for its
bare necessaries ; to deny themselves the luxuries
and conveniences which had become second nature
to them, and to exchange the acquired tastes and
habits of former years of opulence and elegant ease
for the ruder and more homely, although in the
end they may be found not less happy, pursuits of
an inferior and a toiling station.

To a large portion 'of our working classes also
the year which is expiring has been one of suffering
and disaster. From the cottages of thousands of
our unemployed manufacturing operatives it has
swept away every portable article of furniture, the
accumulation of years of toil and saving. Thou-
sands of these classes have been condemned to
partake of sorry Christmas cheer; and not a few have
missed already, although happily the weather thus far
has not been very severe, the accustomed warm
blankets or the comfortable winter clothing. The
pressure of the times has visited all with tolerable
impartiality. It has not selected its victims.
Whilst the merchant prince has been trembling in
his well furnished counting-house for the safety of
his hoards of wealth, the poor man in his wretched
cellar has been watching over the fevered breathings
of his sick wife or child ; for, to aggravate the un-
kindliness of the year, it has been fertile in disease
and in mortality. If bankruptcy and loss have
been before the rich man's eyes ; if for him the
Gazette has had its terrors ; the fever shed and the
parish coffin have been equally before the eyes of
too -many of his humbler 'brethren:-

- -
w e regret strongly that we are not able to hold
out a prospect of any immediate return by the
commercial community to a state of prosperity, or
even of ease, notwithstanding the very important
movement of the Bank of England on Thursday,
reducing the minimum rate of interest on Bills of
Exchange to 5 per cent. 'We have been too deci-
sively struck down to be able at once to rally. The
complicated machinery of commercial credit has
been too completely thrown out of order to be set
in motion readily. After such a crisis as we have
just encountered prudent men will pause, will feel
their way step by step, and calculate their means,
before embarking in any new business. We anti-
cipate that in the new year which is approaching
we shall have some months of probation; and it
may even be that we shall also have some further

yielding of houses, which have thus far been only
temporarily propped up by their friends and con-
nexicns. It must be borne in mind too that
amongst those mercantile establishments, which
have the most triumphantly weathered the storm,
there are few who will not have to feel the loss of
actual capital, in addition to the limitation of mer-
cantile credit; and hence mercantile operations
generally must be confined within a narrower or-
bit, and carried on more exclusively on a real
foundation.

It is tolerably certain, too, that we must experi-
ence next year a limitation of consumption at home
of articles of import and manufacture, to a far
greater extent than we have a prospect of increased
exports and consequent employment of our work-
ing population. The extensive suspension of rail-
way works must seriously affect the condition of
the labourers formerly dependant upon them, and
through them the merchant, the shopkeeper, and
the artizan ; whilst the drain of capital going on
for those lines which are still being constructed
will press with inconvenient severity upon the now
restricted means of the holders of their stocks. The
crisis may indeed be past. We have ileen the worst
of bank suspensions ay26l. Ynerclzatile failures, But
we must 197 kg our minds to the conviction that we
have, as a commercial community, dill much to go
;rough, which will tax all our patience and re-
quire all our prudence and foresight,
To this commercial community of Liverpool the
prospect for the year to come is perhaps brighter
than that of some other communities. We have
been severely and peculiarly tried; and we may
reasonably hope for the absence in the coming year
of the inflictions of the last. We may be spared
the infliction of Irish immigration under which,
and the disease brought with it, we suffered so se-
verely in the year gone by. Ireland cannot for
ever be visited with famine, or partial failure of the
potatoe. We have also the prospect of an ample
supply of the raw material, cotton, which may be
called one of the staple trades of our port. Our
export trade also may be reasonably expected to
increase, from the known fact that the principal
foreign markets are unusually bare of British arti-
cles. But we must not be sanguine. Prudent
caution should be the characteristic of every man's
business transactions for some time to come, unless
the lesson which we have recently received has
been given in vain.

THE supporters of the principle of Dock Ware-
houses, or rather those of our local Journalists
who have taken up the question with less of discre-
tion than knowledge of the real hearings of the
subject in hand, affect to be perfectly amazed at
the influence, both out of doors and in the Council,
of what is generally termed the warehouse interest,
3s shewn in the result of the recent agitation to
procure insertion of a rating clausein the Dock
Bill. The private warehouse-owners were set down
as a class politically defunct. They had conceded
their just claims, in deference to a temporary cry
for the adoption of a new system. which was,
whilst inflicting serious injury upon themselves
alone, to benefit incalculably the rest of the com-
munity. They were conceived to hare henceforth
Little else to do than to set about the task of
reducing their expenditure to the level of their
crippled incomes, or of making out their balance
sheets for the instruction of the Bankruptcy Com-
missioners, their creditors, or the annuitants de-
pendent upon the mass of building property held
by them. Matters, however, have not progressed
so smoothly as was anticipated bf some of the
persecutors of this class of the community. A
egiticaon suffering brings about very rapidly a unity

of endeavour to get Tid of its cause. When it is
found that a weapon, aimed only at a single object,
scatters its shot amongst,the spectators, it is not
very unnatural that the. latter should seek to put a

i) to any further discharges

This has been eminently the case with the work-

ing of the Albert Dock Warehouses thus far. The
public, and especially the tradesmen of the town,
have discovered that the private warehouse interest
is not the only one which is being damaged. They
see' that many of the predictions which that in-

terest advanced as to the tendency of the system,
if carried on under an exclusive system, are being
verified. The merchants were the first to com-
plain that they were not excepted from the general
lot ; but that the privilege of sampling their own

aoo& was to be taken 'from their. 'The master
porters saw with alarm their business, so far as the
Albert Dock was Concerned; transferred exclusively
to a public body. The coopers of the port saw
them:3elves excluded, by the Committee's regula-
tion, from carrying on a business there in which
they had been brought up from boyhood ; and
()they trades looked forward to a similar depriva-
tion. Still, for a time, there was only one Dock
from which they were driven out. The great mass

F the 3rk of the port they have still open to
rem. But it became a totally different question
ben a large extension of the system was pro-
Deed. It became, in fact, a question whether, be-
Ire consenting to such an extension, the justice

of those regulations might not be fairly canvassed,
invelving as they did the utter ruin of some of the
most extensive trades of the port; and hence 'the
increased influence, in the Council and amongst

of that feeling, of which the

warehouse owners are the. most prominent repre-
sentatives. Hence the potential character of the
claims of that body to be dealt with equally, as to
rating with the public body, with whom they have
to compete.

We 'gave in. our last a copy of the memorial
presented to the Council, by the master coopers of
the port, a body of tradesmen second to none in
respectability; and we refer to the substance of
that memorial, not only because the claims which
it urges are strong in themselves, but, as well, be-
cause the coopers alone have as yet felt tile full
force of their exclusion from the Albert Dock.
The committee has its own foremen and coopers
in this dock, and admits none else to work within
its walls. A master cooper may have been em-
ployed for years by a merchant. Some of them
have worked for him during a long life of indus-
try ; yet, although such merchant would gladly be
permitted to keep up the old connexion, and to
have their work done by the old hands, if his vessel
is sent into the Albert Dock—and we presume the
same principle is to be carried out in all our future
enclosed docks—the connexion must be dissolved.
The dock coopers alone must be admitted on board
to head his casks, to repair them, or to determine
upon their security from leakage and waste when ,
warehoused. These men have many of them ex-
tensive premises, some of them on lease, and most
of them at high rentals. They are heavily rated
to our local burthens. They have large capitals
embarked in materials. They have apprentices to
be taught their trade, and to be dependent upon
its permanency in after years. Is it fair that their
interests should be sacrificed to the grinding strin-
gency of the experiment, or to the perhaps hasty
dicta of any committee of their fellow-townsmen ?

But the full extent of the grievance imposed upon
them is not seen at a glance. Surround the whole
of our docks, or those of them only which bring
the commodities most likely to be warehoused on
the dock quays, and what need shall we have, as
a port, of coopers at all, except to mend our water
tubs and make buckets ? These men may close
their establishments. It may be said, however,
that we shall have a sufficient resource in the
coopers engaged by the committee themselves.
But where will they get them from ? Will an ex-
perienced man be found in the port, should we want
a further supply in a few years' time ? The Dock
Committee, we presume, will not take apprentices ;
the masters cannot do so either, or teach them
their trade if they were willing. It is well known
that the cooperage of West India produce, palm
oil, and some other similar articles, affords a large
amount of employment to the coopers, and con-
stitutes a peculiar portion of the business. Now
this portion is most likely to be stored very exten-
sively in the dock warehouses ; and the parties now
principally dependent upon it must at once with.:
draw from business, or transfer themselves, with
their apprentices, to some other port.
The case of this body of men cannot be tainted
with the charge of a wish to monopolise. They
urge, on the' contrary, that by their withdrawal
from the trade, the business in the hands of the
committee and their coopers will become a mono-
poly. They ask to be allowed to enjoy a fair op-
portunity of competition with their opponents;
and heavily burthened as they are by their
position as large ratedayers, as compared with
their opponents, they do not fear the result. Their
claim, moreover, they conceive, is one in which the
whole mercantile community is interested. The
merchant has at present no control over the
charges made for his cooperage, nor security for
the manner in which it is executed.

But if the mercantile community is interested in
the question, the trading interests are still more so.
If it is essential to the working of the dock-ware-
house system that the committee should be their
own coopers, why not their own joiners, their own
carpenters, their own riggers, blockmakers, ropers,
&c. ? The principle contended for, that the com-
mittee must have a full control over every work-
man admitted within their docks, extends this
length or none.

THE subject of Free Trade is one of so dry and
oftentimes complicated a nature, that few casual
readers have the time or inclination to wade
through the long articles occasionally emitted by
the periodical Reviews upon it; and, therefore,
the erroneous doctrine they often send forth is
allowed to pass as if it was irrefragable. An arti-
cle appeared in the October number of the Edin-
burgh Review, which, notwithstanding it has evi-
dently been the effusion of a writer who has stu-
died closely the subject he analyzes, is also so
obviously the production of a strong party writer,
blinded by prejudice, that we are tempted to ex-
pose some of his fallacies which are vented on the
Navigation Question.
The greatest and most pervading of these is the
notion that the greater our purchases of ships or
any other thing abroad, the better,—as we are
certain to export such amount of our own manu-
factures as will cover the cost of all such imports,
to whatever extent they may be brought. Alas !I
the present distress and penury of the country too '
plainly shew the contrary ; whilst they prove as
distinctly that the payments for the large quantity
of corn and provisions we were compelled to im-
port this year, has impoverished us to a degree
which is too palpable to he mistaken. And it may
be asked, How are we to pay the American people
for the corn, provisions, cotton wool, turpentine,
&c., with which they supply us, when the artisans
of the United States arrive, by the rapid strides
they are now making, at such perfection in cotton,
iron, and other manufactures, as to require none
from us ? Then surely shall we have cause to
regret the loss of those valuable customers, our
own colonies, of which the free traders are so
anxious to suggest measures for depriving us.
The Reviewer expresses alarm lest America
should retaliate for our present restrictions, much
reduced as they are; but if he would inquire into
the subject, he would find that the American code
is not more liberal than our own ; consequently,
there is no ground for retaliation.
The late Mr. Deacon Hume undoubtedly has
claims to be considered as a clever man, but he
was not without strong prejudices in favour of
certain doctrines; and his constantly citing the
prosperity of the cotton manufacture as a proof
that we should succeed in the same degree in
every other manufacture, appears to have been
without the consideration that the coals and
machinery of Manchester afforded it advantages
which other trades did not enjoy.
The Reviewer attaches great importance to the
arrival of a few cargoes of sugar from Porto Rico,
and other slave plantations, under the new system,
but quite overlooks the much greater amount of
loss the natioh is sustaining by the blow it has
colonies ; and although at
given
page ive t2o ouB2hreo own old
admits l
that
colonies are extremely
beneficial to the interests of the mother country,
and encourage its shipping, he changes his mind
at page 299, where he more than insinuates that
colonies are of no advantage whatever.
His ideas of allowing foreign vessels to be in-
troduced into our coasting trade, on the plea that
such permission, would not be availed of, is per-