The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1840-06-02 00:00:00

alone the Whig faction lean for a wretched and de-
graded existence. They have declared by this bill, and
by the mouth of Lord John Russell, that they will
either have perjury or a popish democracy. Let them
dissolve upon the question, and the Protestant con-
stituencies of England will crush them beneath the
weight of their honest indignation !

DISSOLVE, LORD JOHN-DISSOLVE ! ENGLAND

S READY!

The editor of the Mercury is certainly one of the
most slippery antagonists it has ever been our fortune
to encounter. No sooner have we detected a sophistry
or fastened a charge upon him, than, with infinite
cunning, he contrives to wriggle from our grasp. No
sooner have we checked his confidential swagger,
plucked him of his borrowed plumage, and left him
as naked as an unfledged gosling, than we find him
pert as ever, gabbling, with undiminished volubility,
a fresh tissue of flimsy absurdities. Blending together
the most outrageous conceit and the most profound
ignorance, his policy is to bully, to quibble, and to
misrepresent by turns, until, by the strange jumble of
incongruous matter which he infuses into his diatribes,
he has managed to bewilder alike his reader and him-

seit.

On the last occasion upon which we had the honour

of receiving our contemporary's abuse—and his abuse
is the only honour which he can confer upon us—we

were attacked chiefly upon our own quarrel. We had
in our own behalf alone disturbed the equanimity of

this self-complacent personage. But, unfortunately,
we volunteered to apply the knout for a gentleman
who, had he not been constrained by a thorough con-

;empt for the offender, would, we doubt not, have

spared us the unwelcome task. Yet the Mercury is
angry because we gave expression to this feeling; and,
well aware that no challenge of his could bring down
upon him such a visitation, is .as fluent in big words
as a bully who has got a vow in heaven." He has

thrown his slime at the gentleman in question on pre-
vious occasions, and been allowed to crawl on his

obscene path uncrushed, as such a thing would have
been by a meaner tread. He has been allowed to
breathe the same air for a time, and to perpetrate his

vapid impertinences unnoticed ; and, because his min-
gled nauseousness and insignificance have hitherto
preserved him from annihilation, he indulges in the
empty braggadocio of former insults, alike unresented,
and presumes to arrogate equality with a
.man whose
pursuits are too lofty to permit him to notice seriously
so contemptible a scribbler. Would that we could
convey to the Mercury a sense of his utter insignifi-

cance, as regards every quality of mind and intellect,
when compared with the gentleman in question !
We shall not< attempt to follow our contemporary

Tough the various windings by .which he vainly en-

deavours to creep out of the dilemma into which his
ignorance originally brought him. Our object in no-
ticing at first his slanderous and impudent effusions
was, to shew the false and unfair basis upon which Lord
Stanley's bill was attacked by the Mercury and such as
he. We-pointed out the distorted medium through
which its provisions were viewed. We proved that ob-
jections were brought against that bill which might,

with equal reason, be brought against the present sys-
tem ; and that, in many important particulars, so far
from decreasing the facilities of registration to a bona

fide claimant, it had a contrary tendency. These, the
main features of our case, the Mercury has quietly
dropped; and his present diatribe of two columns and
a half is composed of a series of paltry cavils, spread
over so large a space, and so interlarded with patch-
work of other men's absurdities, that it is hard to find
out which is the original mercurial brass and which
the lacquered ware borrowed for the occasion.

We will give, however, an instance or two of our

contemporary's mode of arguing. We showed him,

,n our last notice, that Mr. M'Neile was, in substance,

correct in stating that Lord Stanley's bill brought the
registry to the claimant's door, and pointed out that
clause in the act by which power is given to the Lord
Lieutenant to provide additional places for holding the

registry sessions. Our contemporary, however, has a
distorted vision, which will not allow him to see any-
thing in its natural shape. Accustomed to the shifts
and collusions of whig legislation, he cannot believe
that a clause in an act of parliament can be interpre-
ted in any other than a tricky sense. There is a con-
dition, he says, which we have " carefully kept out of
view, and which nullifies the clause, or, at the least,
renders it of partial and uncertain operation." And
what does our reader suppose is this condition which
we have so carefully kept out of view ? Why, that the
Lord Lieutenant, previdus to such additional place of
registration being appointed, must be shown its neces-
sity by a petition from a meeting of magistrates. Lord
Stanley has concluded that wisdom is not intuitive even
in a Lord Lieutenant, and has requested the magistracy
to point out when and how the power given to him by
this bill should be exercised. Had his lordship's bill
said that "it shall be lawful for the priests so assem-
bled, being not less than five, or a majority of them, to
petition the Lord Lieutenant," we should have heard
nothing about the clause in question being nullified by
a " condition ; or, perhaps, it would be convenient for
the barristers to hold their sittings in the chapels at
once, unless that locality is too near the burial places
of some of the Tom CasSidys, whose votes it might
occasionally be convenient to renew.
Again, our contemporary accuses us of falsehood in
stating, that by Lord Stanley's Bill the onus of proving
an objection is thrown upon the objector, and states in
proof of his assertion that " the 21st section requires
the claimant to prove his claim in all cases by the pro-
duction of his title deeds." Why so, we repeat, does
the present Reform Act. Our assertion, as the Mer-
cury is well aware, had to do with parties objected to
and not with claimants, whose position is not at all
altered by the 22d section of Lord Stanley's Bill, so far as
regards the necessity of offering proof of qualification.
The objector is, by Lord Stanley's bill, for the first
time, expressly required to prove his objection. The
Mercury, with his usual trickery, quotes the wrong
section of the act; but that is a small matter in his
way. _ _

Having perpetrated a column of sheer cavilling, our
contemporary flies off at a tangent, and lugs in to his
aid the Spectator, the Atlas, Mr. Sharman Crawford,
and the Northern Whig. Our contemporary is per-

fectly at liberty to adopt as many of other peoples' ab-
surdities as he pleases. We have only to do with

iinself, but we cannot omit to notice the ridiculous

idea, which he puts forth as Mr. Sharman Crawford's,
respecting the form of notice required to be sent in by
a claimant under Lord Stanley's bill. "We have be-
fore us," exclaims the Mercury, "a notice filled up by
Mr. Crawford, for a £2O leaseholder, comprising no
fewer than 26 particulars ! !" A mighty great curiosity
such a notice must be ! We can only remark that the
very simple one, quoted by Mr. M`Neile at the Amphi-
theatre meeting, is all that is required by the ninth
clause for a freeholder; and that with respect to a
leaseholder, the only material alteration required by
that clause, is " the names of the lessors and of the
lives in the lease." It would be easy, by a stretch of in-
genuity, to suppose a claim, part freehold part lease-
hold, for lives as well as for years, which would re-
quire a considerable number of particulars; but to a
great extent the same kind of dovetailed qualification
would require a complicated form of claim under the
present law. The opponents of the noble lord are re-
ally put to sorry shifts when they find it necessary to
resort to such miserable attempts at delusion.
We willingly close here our controversy with the
Mercury upon this subject, and are perfectly satisfied
with the relative position in which we stand towards
him at its conclusion. But we are compelled to say a
few words upon the personal portion of his attack upon
us. The Mercury asserts that he is now confirmed in
his " suspicions as to our identity !" What, we
ask, has the Editor of the Mercury to do with our
identity ? We are no more an " anonymous assail-
ant" than he is. We wear no " mask" which we are
unwilling or ashamed to withdraw, under any circum-
stances; and our identity for any honest object is as
perfect as that of our contemporary.
It is quite possible that the Mercury may wish to
bring to his aid, in any future contest he has with us,
a little of the personality which is, with writers of his
class, the ordinary substitute for argument. In wind-
ing up his angry tirade, he says, that if our " de-
tection" " be accomplished, all his revenge will be to
publish our name, with half a dozen lines in ex-
planation." We cannot but despise alike the head and
the heart of a man who is ready to resort to this