The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1840-10-27 00:00:00

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September, but no attack had been made at any point.
Strong apprehensions were entertained at Matamoras
of a descent, either there, or at some other accessible
port. A letter, dated Matamoras, Sept. 1, says that
a detachment from Arista's army was on the opposite
side of the river on the previous night. This sudden
countermarch was owing to the expected attack of the
Texian forces by sea. Intelligence, to this effect; had
been immediately made known to the General by express.

We have received our files of the Jamaica papers to
the 3d. ultimo. They contain very little news of im-
portance. A society had been formed in the island,
for the purpose of co-operating with the West India
Immigration society, recently organised in England,
and the most beneficial results were likely to follow
from the operations of the Jamaica branch. The fol-
lowing extract from the Royal Gazette is the only
article for which we can find room in our present
publication :

THE. SILK COMPANIES.—The following is an extract
of a letter from Mr. Whitmarsh, to a house in this
city :
" From my examination of the South and South-
Western States, I prefer Jamaica for the culture of
silk ; and shall make diligent preparation to be with
you in the autumn. I have a steam engine in readi-
ness, with fixtures for a saw-mill, and shingle mill, and
other machinery to he set in motion in a few days after
their arrival. I shall leave with Mrs. Whitmarsh about
the Ist of September, for Kingston. The machinery
and families will be about six weeks later, and will sail
for St. Ann's It will be perceived that I have begun
at the foundation, and engaged several families of active,
steady, temperance whites, to commence what I intend
as a pattern village of industry, and to show what can
he done for this beautiful island, which needs but a
spirit of enterprise, to raise it far above its best days.
I will not promise too much, but endeavour, with your
co-operation, to carry out the plans, which I will make
known in detail when I shall have the pleasure of meet-
ing you in Kingston. 1 have white and black families
engaged, and shall have more to follow when I have all
things prepared for their reception. So great is my
faith in the full success of the enterprise, and of its
importance to the island, as well as the individuals
concerned, that I will very much enlarge upon my first
plans, without enlarging the capital. I might have
returned sooner, and made some stir about the matter,
but was well aware of what must be done to ensure
success. I shall leave nothing undone that all former
and present experience may suggest, and I doubt not
of ample success."

The foreign news since our last is of the highest im-
portance. The abdication of the Queen of Spain, in
consequence of the difficulties of her position, has been
fully confirmed. But the most important event that
has transpired has been the resignation of M. Thiers
and his ministry, and the consequent summoning, by
the King of the French, of the leading conservatives of
that country, to form a new administration. The Lon-
don Times of Saturday furnishes us with a list of the
members of the new ministry. If this list can be re-
lied upon, we have very little hesitation in saying that
the question of war or peace will be very speedily
solved, as the leading members of the new ministry are
known to entertain feelings of the most friendly nature
towards this country. It is said that the ministry will
comprise the following :—Marshal Soult, M. Guizot,
M. Duchatel, Admiral Duperre, M. Teste, M. Martin,
(du Nord,) M. Dufaure, M. Cunin Gridaine, M. Ville-
main, and M. Passy.
In the composition of the new ministry we find an
ample guarantee for the preservation of the peace of
Europe. This is a consummation which cannot but
prove highly acceptable to the mercantile interests of
Great Britain, whom we have every reason to congra-
tulate upon the change.
It is impossible to predict the effect which the resig-
nation of M. Thiers and his associates will produce
upon the French nation generally. Our volatile neigh-
bours are so much the slaves of impulse that it would
he highly imprudent to speculate upon the subject. Of
this, however, we feel certain, that the principal Euro-
pean governments, interested in the settlement of the
Eastern Question, will hail the downfall of M. Thiers
as the harbinger of peace.

The struggle for ascendancy in our municipal coun-
cil has commenced in right earnest. Candidates are
already engaged in an active canvass in each of the
wards. The radicals have, at length, found one for
West Derby ward, in the person of Mr. Laurence Hey-
worth, jun. While the preparations for the approach-
ing contest are going on, we would particularly urge
upon the attention of our conservative friends the
necessity of untiring vigilance and perseverance. Let
them ponder over the " word in season," which one Of
our correspondents has thought it his duty to place
before them. Over-confidence will prove the most
fatal error into which the conservative electors can fall.
They ought not to give way to this feeling until they
have placed the conservative candidate in each ward in
such a position on the poll that his return will be a
matter of complete certainty.

Amongst the many cheering displays of Protestant
and Conservative feeling, of which our good old town
has lately been the universal scene, the proceedings of
Thursday last are worthy of, and we doubt not wil
occupy, a prominent position in the memory of the
present generation. A calm, a dignified and decorous
loyalty, a beneficent and christian spirit united in beau-
tiful propriety, with the fearless and uncompromising
expression of sound Protestant truth, were the charac-
teristics of that day's proceedings ; and when we look
around us and contrast with them the furious ravings
which distinguish the gatherings of whig-radicalism
in our own land—or the frenzied, restless and reckless
outbursts which attend every expression of popular
opinion in other lands, we must confess that we are
proud both of the party and of the country to which
we belong.

It is not, however, merely the indulgence of this feel-
ing of just pride which induces us to recur to a subject
in itself so gratifying. The Protestant inhabitants of
Liverpool need no finger of ours to point to a page
which is destined to be so memorable in the history of
their town. Our object has a wider range and a higher
purpose. It is to excite and to fasten the attention,
not only of our fellow-townsmen, but of our fellow-
countrymen at large, upon the relative position of the
two great parties in the state—the whig-radical and
conservative parties ;—and to enable them to deter-
mine in which of those parties the permanent interests,
the peace and the security of Great Britain centre at
the present crisis.

If we look abroad amongst the kingdoms of civilized
Europe, we cannot but be struck with the unsettled
and menacing picture which everywhere presents itself.
Russia, to the Eastward, intriguing, ambitious, and un-
principled, already counts as her own the dominions of
the Sultan ; and only waits her time to plant the eagle
upon the turrets of Constantinople. Her agents, subtle
and daring, are in every court and her gold is sapping
the foundations of every throne which has constitutional
liberty for its basis. Austria and Prussia,—sluggish
and inert—sleep upon a smouldering volcano ; whilst
the states of Germany, with Hanover and Belgium are
ready to crumble in pieces at the sound of the first
cannon which breaks their present uneasy and deceit-
ful repose. In western Europe, Spain and Portugal
are in a state of frightful and bloody anarchy, alter-
nately the prey of their revolutionary and absolutist
factions. In both these wretched lands, a licentious
soldiery, bloated with plunder, hold in their ruffian
hands the sway of Government and the lives of their
feeble monarchs ; whilst an equally licentious priest-
hood fills up with its extortions the full measure of
suffering meted out for their outcast and degraded
population. In the centre of all this mass, of combus-
tion,—through which popery is busily laying the train
whose explosion is to light her, amidst ruin and desol-
ation, to a renewal of the empire,—the restless spirit of
infidel France, crushed and bruised but not extinguish-
ed, is struggling still with the dream of rapine and
universal conquest which during the close of the last
and the beginning of the present centuries brought
down upon her so bloody and so fearful a retribution.
The fierce passions of her democracy are daily lashing
themselves into more dangerous excitement ; their
wild longing for blood,—unappeased by the oceans
which were shed in the fields of Portugal and Spain,
of Quatre Bras and Waterloo,—is equalled only by the
deep and demoniac hatred with which they regard the
hands by which those longings were for a time subdued.
War—war—at any price and in any cause is• the cry
of millions of her wild and savage populace—of her
republican and unprincipled politicians. War with
Europe, with all the world ; but, first and last,—and
above all—War with Great Britain

Such is the picture,—when stript of the disguises, so