The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1836-10-28 00:00:00

THE LIVERPOOL STANDARD.

Vie Eiberpool g:tanbarb.

FRIDAY MORNING, OCTOBER 2% 1836.

That any party or society of men in this kingdom,
proverbial for its loyalty of feeling throughout all the
nations of the earth, deeming themselves respectable,
and calling themselves Englishmen, could have been
found at this advanced period of our history—this age of
liberality and of improved understanding—guilty of such
ignorance of the common usages of our great society,
such indecorum of sentiment at a public dinner, is suf-
ficient to attach to each and every individual present who
could so compromise himself and his own character a
mark of indelible disgrace that will stick by him for the
remainder of his natural existence ; and as these amiable
associates of reason have placed themselves in the pillory
of public contempt, they May not feel surprise that we
feel it a part of our duty, as loyal subjects devotedly at-
tached to the person and office of our gracious sovereign,
to give them the full benefit of their own freely-sought
debasement before the general body of their countrymen.
If notoriety for their right valiant deed be the object
they sought, notoriety sufficient shall they have, and fax
and wide wherever our columns circulate.

It was, and we repeat it without reserve or qualifica-_
on, an act of moral treason against the office as well
as the person of the chief magistrate, wlio, by virtue of
that office should stand exempt from party feeling and
secure from the littleness of those shrug-of-the-shoulder
gentlemen, and their paltry detraction, Why had not
some one among them the moral courage, the Manhood
to speak out, and in fair open argument openly state his
-objections, if any, to the public course of the sovereign ;
fur with his Majesty's private feelings us a man. and an
English gentleman, no one can have a right. to inter-
fere, and much less to attribute to him unworthy motives.
in the execution of an onerous state duty,
under the
special advice of his responsible advisers ? The consti-
tutional maxim that " the • King 'can do no wrong," is
evidently lost upon those men of Baal, and they have
started a new principle, founded upon the theory of pre-
sumed personal responsibility, and thus ignorantly per-
verted' that, which iS one of the best safeguards of con-
stituted freedOm under a mixed monarchy and free in-
stitutions. Poor souls, these neWly.created Jeg,islatOrs;
they have yet to go to school to learn the first prinCiples
o: that government under which they have the vanity—
the presumption—like our own sapient town councillors
to legislate for their fellow-citizens. It were folly in-
deed, to suffer tamely the humiliations to which persOns
so palpably ignorant of the essential usages of our
hitherto well-regulated society would subject us.
The act of flagrant disloyalty towards him, who, how-
ever illustrious in station is but legally under his high
estate the chief trustee of our constitutional compact,
and always held irresponsible for his public acts, is but
the prelude to that indignity or possibly that personal
outrage which would be offered Min but for the protec-
tion of the laws! But we maintain that even personally
William the Fourth, is the last to be marked out for a
uthlic act of reprobation ; and that too by a set of his
disorderly pro-popish or pro-radical, or rather pro-re-
publican subjects. A more patriotic monarch never sat
upon the throne of these realms ; and did we not know
this to be an incontrovertible truth, no inducement of
favour or of patronage would allow us to compromise
our own lionoutr—our personal credit with those amongst
whom We have hitherto lived and 'moved, and been held
in esteem by declaring it. 1., it because his Majesty has
shown a conscientious respect for his oath, as the oath of
a Protestant King, bound to uphold the integrity of the
reformed church in Englard—the tenni e by which he
holds his crown, under what we declare, to have been a
dignified manifestation of personal feeling against the
gross insult which has been offered it by a hireling men
dicant agitator, and his yet more debased vassals, that
these tribunitial instigators of treasonable democracy-_.
of infidel depravity or papal bigotry, have singled out him,
as the mark of their toadlike denunciation ?

The noblemen and gentlemen of East Worcestershire,
Amongst whom we have sorneStaunch friends, have formed
a proper estimate of this pitiful affair, and it is but justly
complimentary to them that we should, in the columns of
the LIVERPOOL STANDARD, re-echo their noble senti-
ments—promulgate the moral castigation .they haVe in-
flicted-On the parties who have thus lowered themselves
in the scale of human' credit. Cowards -at 'heart, but
tyrants in 'principle, such creatures shriek front the re.-

The unmanly—the unchristian indignity recently of-
fered to our protestant King and his amiable consort by
a few self-degrjtded beings in a certain provincial city,
hitherto proverbial for its propriety and its loyalty, and
whom we can hardly honour with the name of men, and
far less gentlemen, has met its severe rebuke in the
splendid meeting at Droitwich on Friday last.
The rank and the respectability of East Worcester-
shire, under the presidency of Mr. Packington, have
visited with a signal retribution the meanly contemptible
insult which could in a public assembly receive the
toasted health of our revered monarch in silence! Proh
pudor! Where is the honour—the blood—the pride—
the English feeling that will not rise up with becoming
indignation, and brand with the finger of scorn the petty
malignity dr the insatiable malevolence that could so
madly undervalue our national character? Are these
men—madmen we would rather ray-,--dead tO the rules
of ethical decorum, or entirely lOst- to the influence of
shame or the dictates of common decency ? Must we,
in imitation of Diogenes, in the broad face of day, in
cultivated Britain, and in the nineteenth century of the
christian era, illuminate their faces before their fellow-
men, and seek for their honesty amidst the rabble rout of
their Bacchanalian revel ? Are they so ignorant as not
to know that a King of England, by the very pecu-
liarity of his station, is not the fair mark for their pitiful
revenge, or their still more despicable contumely ? Are
they, drunk as they are, in their radical coxcombry, vain
enough to think that they can reduce this fair—this
beautiful—this, generally speaking, intellectual country
to the barbarism of degenerate Greece in the day of her
frenzied democracy, that they may glut their depraved
appetites, and gloat upon their feast of hoprd-for spolia-
tion in the issue? Yes, it really does appear that these
bloated enthusiasts for liberality of opinion—these boast-
ing sticklers for liberty of conscience—these improved,
reformed, regenerate councillors--.-patron's of -freedom
and paragons of justice—of " equal justice," of " cheap:
law," and "good governMent," branded their own jaco-
binical foreheads with the indelible stigma of cowardly
treasonable disloyally, aye, cowardly treasonable dis-
loyalty !
We are prepared to put a justification on the record
before the supreme court of the British nation for the
terms here used, and their correct application too. It
matters not to us whether-we convict' them of moral or
actual treason; the one is the act of cowardice, the other
of open or even noble daring, which, right or wrong,
jastifies the deed at the peril of consequences; the other
constitutes the deed in intention, hurt meanly shrinks
from the responsibility. And this is the case of the
worthies before us, of,:whose conduct a bold and just
cognizance has been taken.