The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1841-12-10 00:00:00

THE LIVERPOOL TIMES

Our contemporary the Liverpool Times is certainly the
most pertinacious being it has ever been our fortune to en-
counter; and yet it is hard to say whether his pertinacity or
his indiscretion is most damaging to the party which is
afflicted with his support. So far as the defunct majority in
the council is concerned in, the tardiness displayed in pur-
suing the claims of Liverpool to he the station for the West
India mails, we had expressed our opinion,. and, havingdone
so, were content to join our efforts with those of our fellow-
townsmen to repair past neglect by an earnest and combined
attempt to procure a reversal of the temporary decision
against our port which has been come to by government—if,
indeed, any decision can as yet be said to have been made.
Our contemporary, however, in the first instance, having
endeavoured to depreciate our past exertions, humble we
admit, to call the attention of our fellow-townsmen to this
important question, and to magnify his own, professes on
Tuesday his willingness to aid us in those which we are now
making, " provided that we do not attempt to turn them to
a factious purpose"—viz., that of throwing blame upon his
pet " liberal" majority of the council, of which he is anxious
to protrude himself into the situation of apologist-in-chief.
Now, heaven help, say we, the body which has for its apo-
logist our blundering and indiscreet contemporary, the
Liverpool Times ! " Save me from my friends" is a prayer
which that body may well make ; and above all other, " Save
me from the advocacy of the Liverpool Times !" For what
does this indiscreet advocate put forth in its last ? Why this
astounding fact, corroborative of all which we ever advanced
as to the tardiness of the steps taken by the council upon this
question. " We published above a year ago," exclaims the
Times, led away from the consideration of the interests of its
assumed clients by its absurd passion for the indulgence of
self laudation—" We published above a year ago those parti-
culars respecting the contract of the government with the
projectors of the line, and the course to be taken by the
boats from Europe and back again, which the Editor of the
STANDARD gives in his last Friday's paper," and which, we
may add, so far as the mere particulars of the contract in
question are concerned, most other journals from the Land's
End to John o'Groats can equally boast of doing. But what
of that, most excellent contemporary ? Flow much does that
better your plea in behalf of the exertions used by the coun-
cil to make Liverpool the port of departure and arrival for
those packets—setting aside for the present the indulgence of
your own absurd vanity ? We will examine.
Somewhere about, or above, a year ago, the fact that Go-
vernment had contracted for this line of packets was pub-
lished in the luminous columns of the Liverpool Times;
and of course all the world, and all the talent and public
spirit in it, which was at that remote date comprised within
the liberal town-council of Liverpool, are readers of the Li-
verpool Times. And yet how long, we ask, was it before
the said council was stirred up by the eloquence of the Li-
verpool Times to stir in the question ? Why, reader, not
for six, or seven, or eight, or nine months afterwards ; for
not a step did the council take until the Gth of May in the
present year, when they appointed a committee for the pur-
pose ! Yes, the information and the eloquence afforded
them by the Liverpool Times, added to some of our own,
could never move them until the 6th of May 1841, nearly
fourteen months after the original contract had been entered
into, which was dated the 20th March 1840—eleven months
after an Admiralty committee sate to consider upon the se-
lection of a port—and, as we have already stated, from six
to nine months (for the date of that occurrence is at present
apocryphal) after the Liverpool Times had enlightened their
exceeding darkness upon the subject!
We readily admit that when their attention had been
called to it, the council took up the question with a
zeal approaching to that which was becoming its impor-
tance to the interests of the port and the mercantile body of
Liverpool. We give our fullest meed of praise to the exer-
tions and the valuable evidence afforded to the parliamentary
committee by Mr. George Hall Lawrence himself, by Mr.
Aikin, and by Lieutenant Lord. But, without pressing the
question whether more evidence might not have been afford-
ed—whether, had the question been a dock-warehouse ques-
tion, more evidence would not have been afforded—we must
reiterate our conviction that the exertion was made toe late!
Memorials poured in upon government from Bristol, Pen-
zance, and other places, as we have shewn in a preceding
article, during the sitting of the Admiralty committee—from
the 3d to the 16th of July 1840 ; and did the council of Li-
veryool send in any such memorial? NO. And what, we
ask, was the result of this neglect? Why, that in the par-
liamentary committee which government were induced to
grant by these very memorials, the interests of the ports of
Liverpool and Glasgow, and of the manufacturing interests
of the North of England and of Scotland, were so inade-
quately represented as we have shewn them, and as they
must be admitted, to have been. The Channel ports, in
fact, so far as weight in the committee went, had it all their
own way. _ _

_
But we are told, and it was pressed by Mr. Aikin at the
late council meeting, that the channel ports had the advan-
tage from the outset, owing to the terms of the original con-
tract entered into by government with the owners of the
boats. We readily admit this, and as well that they were
aided, as we shall spew in an article which will appear in our
next, by a jobbing spirit which characterised and, we submit,
tainted the evidence brought before the committee to sub-
stantiate their claims (we allude to the evidence of Mr. Ward,
an employe of the Southampton railway, and a contractor for
the works at the port itself). But we cannot admit the va-
lidity of the argument of Mr. Aikin that, because of the con-
tract already existing between the government and a private
company, Liverpool, or the Finance Committee to whom her
claims are committed, ought to despair of effecting a change.
For so far as the government itself is concerned, it must be
remembered that it has already conceded the open_ nature of
the question as to the selection of a port, and the haste and
unadvisedness of the original contract as to its being in the
channel, by the appointment of two committees, and b) the

admission into the last of evidence in favour of Bristol, the
West of Ireland, and of Liverpool itself. Once satisfied of
the superior advantages of the latter, there can be no ques-
tion as to the power of government to win .or buy over the
company ; and we are perfectly satisfied, and, indeed,' our
columns of to-day afford ample evidence of the fact, that very
little objections on the part of the company would be, or
ought to be, offered to the change.