The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1841-02-16 00:00:00

Mr. LABOUCHERE said that the proposed alteration would
have but a very gradual effect on the price of West India
produce. It was to be remembered also that the price of rum
at present was higher than it had been for the last 25 ycars.
The growth of sugar in India was discouraged by closing the
English market against East India ruin, while at the same
time the West India planter was induced to convert into rum
canes which would otherwise have been converted into su-
gar, the result of which was to enhance the price of the latter
commodity in the home market.

Mr. EWART adverted to the petition from the East India
growers, in which they declared their willingness to have all
slave-grown produce excluded from the advantages of the
proposed change. He regretted that it was hot proposed to
afford similar advantages to the tobacco growers of India.
Mr. COLQUHOUN and Mr. HAWES both supported the
motion.

Sir A. GRANT suggested that the duty should be gradually
reduced in order to ensure that the reduction of prices of
West India produce should be gradual also.
Dr. LusnINGToN said that the injustice attending our
conquests, and our subsequent rule in India, rendered it
doubly incumbent upon ns to legislate hereafter with no other
view than that of the happiness of the inhabitants of that
country.

After some conversation, in which Lord SANDON and Mr.
LABOUCHERE took part, as to the propriety of delaying the
period when the bill should come into operation, in the course
of which the latter gentleman said, he could consent to no
other delay than that which was indispensible, and which, of
itself was sufficient to render the change gradual,
Mr. HOGG deprecated the attempt to introduce an exemp-
tion from the advantages of the bill of slave-grown sugar, for
he could not admit that a single pound of slave-grown sugar
was ever exported from India, and it would be prejudicial to
allow the impression to go abroad that there was any such
thing as slave-grown sugar in India.
Sir R. PEEL said that the principle to be laid- down in the
government of our colonies ought to be that of perfect
equality, and that principle applied with especial force to the
case of India, the manufactures of which had been destroyed
by the introduction of those of England. He could not ad-
mit that slavery existed in the East Indies of such a nature
as to warrant any duties of a discriminating character to be
levied on the produce 'of that country, or to warrant any
postponement of placing it on an equality with our West In-
dian colonies. He would suggest an immediate reduction of
duty on East India produce by 25., with an intimation that
it would be reduced 2s. more next year, and so on. until the
whole of the discriminating duty should be abolished. He
must say, however, that the West Indians had a right to
complain of having been misled by the proceedings of par-
liament, and of not receiving sufficient notice of the inten-
tions of the government; still he felt so strongly the justice
of the claims of the Eait Indies, that, unless some hon.
gentleman proposed the adoption of his own suggestion, he
should support the resolution.

The resolution was agreed to without a division.
After the disposal of the other orders of the day the
House adjourned.

TRIAL OF LORD CARDIGAN.

TO THE HOUSE OF LORDS AND THEIR COMMITTEE

Feb. 8.
My Lords,—One among the thousands in this country
who look with reverence and love to the august assembly of
the peers of Great Britain takes the .liberty of addressing
you on the important subject, which is appointed to come
under your judicial consideration on the 16th inst.
In regard to the immediate object of that inquiry I shall
not trouble your lordships. Every principle of fair play dear
to an English heart revolts at the idea of a man being taken
off his guard. If it was intended to enforce an existing law
in its rigour, or rather to put a construction upon it which
was never contemplated, public notice ought previously to
have been given of that intention. But this. was not done
in. the case before your lordships. Equity, therefore, and
mercy will sit assessors with justice on the trial of Lord
Cardigan.
But the sentiments and principles on the subject of duel-
ling, avowed and acted upon- in the progress of this trial, will
be of far more importance in their consequences than the
issue of the trial itself. An opportunity, in fact, is about to
be afforded your lordships of adding yet another benefit to
the many which England has already experienced at your
hands—an opportunity of stamping your past exertions in
the cause of truth, religion, and civilisation, with the seals of
sincerity and consistency : nay, words still stronger befit the
occasion, and I fear not to say, that your lordships stand at
this moment in a situation of great responsibility, in which
the eyes of the nation are fixed upon you. anx,iously expect-
ing that you will embrace this favourable occasion to inter-
pose the shield of your influence between society and that
systematic violation of its laws, which has so long and so
unhappily prevailed amongst us. It is on the question,
therefore, of duelling, that I would now respectfully engage
your lordships' attention
Every one will admit the absurdity of the bathos from the
lance to the pistol, from the grave and noble auto date,
which the combat of the chivalrous ages exhibited in its
solemn appeal to God, as the witness and the judge of right
and wrong, to the modern system, resorted to on the most
trivial as well as the most important occasions, ' and as
striking a proof of the degenerate faithlessness of the present
as the ancient custom, of which it is the distorted image, is
of the simple faith and piety of the olden time.
The argument for the defence of duelling, as at present
constituted, is short, simple, and intelligible. The 'vantage-
ground of principle is conceded at once ; but the world, it is
contended, could not go on without it. There are points
where human legislation must stop, where unwritten must
take the place of written laws ; society cannot be kept in
check except by fear of personal consequences attendant on
the violation of those unwritten laws : the system of duelling
affords that check ; expediency, therefore, requires the
toleration of duelling.
Now, were the edifice of society founded on the shifting
and variable sands of human folly and weakness, such rea-
soning might pass current; but if, as we believe and know,
its foundations are laid deep below the waves of time and
change on the eternal and immutable rock of Divine strength
and wisdom, it becomes , our duty to test that reasoning by
the revealed will of God, and if we find it ring false (as even
its advocates confess it does), then, in the confidence that
the expediency consists in the resolution of human wisdom
and will into the wisdom and will of God, boldly to repudi.
ate the perversion of the doctrine usually promulgated un-
der its name, in this as well as in every other instance, as
alike sinful and cowardly in its principle, short-sighted -in its
views, and destructive in its operation. The Bible is the
only standard of right and wrong, and we read there, " Thou
shalt not do evil that good may come of it." The defence,
therefore, of duelling on the ground of expediency falls to
the ground ; and no other defence is set up for it.
But the truth is, that society, so far from courting or need-
ing the support of duelling, abhors and disowns a system
which strikes at the very foundation of social order. Duel-
ling is the mere foster-child of public opinion—the public
opinion, moreover, not of the nation at large, but of a class,
on whose sentiments and practices any opinion expressed by
your lordships, its brightest ornaments, must necessarily
possess incalculable influence. It is this influence which we
implore you to exercise on the present occasion.
It is not in the indulgence of malice or revenge that the
essential iniquity of duelling consists. Many a man has
fought a duel with perfect innocence as regards these points.
Few, I believe, take their stations in the field with the de-
liberate intention of " killing, maiming, or doing some
grievous bodily injury" to their antagonist, as imputed to
the noble earl now summoned to your lordships' bar for
trial. Far from it. Few but would refuse a challenge, were
it not for the disgrace with which such a refusal stamps the
character. It has been often and truly said, that it requires
more courage to refuse than to accept a challenge. It re-
quires much for a single man to do so; but for the husband
and the father, whose prospects for life may be blasted, and
his wife and children reduced to beggary and wretchedness,
in consequence of his refusal, the trial must be one of bitter-
ness indeed. It is not, I repeat, in malice or revenge that
the evil of the system lies. Nor need I insist upon the
violation of the commandment, " Thou shalt not kill." No
one will dispute, at least no man who ever saw his antagonist
fall in a duel, but will remember the blow with which con-
science knocked at his heart in that moment of anguish, the
distinctness with which for days and years afterwards he
heard the still calm voice of God- whispering in the silence
of his heart's wilderness, " Where is • thy brother Abel ?"
The evil lies deeper still. It consists in a total oblivion of
that vital principle, of natural religion in the first instance,
but far more emphatically so of Christianity—a principle
which every man who fights a duel, challenger or challenged,
consciously or unconsciously violates—a principle written in
letters of light in the book of inspiration, in the following
heart-stirring words, " Ye are not your OWN, for ye are
bought with a price ; wherefore glorify God in your body
and in your spirit, WHICH ARE Gm:es." Life, then, is
not a man's own property. to peril at his pleasure, any more
than it is his own to dismiss by suicide ; and, till this prin-
ciple be recognised, not as involved in the mere question of
duelling, but in its full uncompromising extent, -a man can
never be thoroughly depended upon in the full confidence of
his proving, under all circumstances and without mental
reservation, loyal to his sovereign, faithful to his God, and
true to his country

This, my lords, is an age of recurrence to first principles,
a period unexampled in the annals of the world. The
shackles of ages are falling off, and the human intellect is
rising up, unconscious of its strength, and likely, in pure ig-
norance how to restrain and economise that strength, to rend
asunder the bones, the muscles, the ligaments which are
alike its prison, and the necessary instruments of its energy
and activity ; in other words, to burst through and destroy
the whole framework of society. To preserve that frame-
work, to discipline that awakening strength, and to direct to
those high and noble purposes which from the elevation on
which we now stand, we may see opening out before us in
long vistas, as it were, of untrodden enterprise, in the map
of God's providence, education must be resorted to ; not that
spurious education which draws its theory and its practice
alike from the dust it studiously looks down upon, whose
wisdom is of the earth, earthy--but that which God intended
when he distinguished man from the beasts that perish, by
creating him with his face erect to heaven, in the image of
his Maker. If society is to be preserved, it must be Chris-
tianised. Your lordships have acknowledged this great truth,
by your exertions to preserve the Christian principle in edu-
cation. England owes you much for all you have done, for
all you are still doing in this great causc. But it would be
mockery to hold forth the decalogue with one hand, and with
the other a charter of legitimation to that spurious offspring
of human vice and folly which, involving as it does a direct
transgression, not of one only, but of almost every law in the
decalogue, virtually annuls it. And this charter your lord-
ships sign—the good that you have done your inconsistency
may undo, if in the remotest degree you indirectly sanction
the system in
question.
The expediency of enacting prohibitory laws against duel-
ling, such as exist in some foreign countries, must necessarily
be left to the wisdom of the united houses to determine ; it
would probably be decided in the negative, and perhaps justly
so. But a far more efficient remedy is in your lordship's own
hands, as the highest court of honour in the kingdom, the
capital of the column of English nobility, the sun, as it were,
whose lustre and the spots that obscure its disk are alike re-