The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1841-08-20 00:00:00

THE LUCKY CORN SPECULATORS

We rather imagine that, when profit and loss accounts are
summed up and balanced, the recent anti-corn-law agitation
will be found, by some gentlemen we could point out, to
have been the most profitable agitation hitherto discovered.
Pity it is that Daniel O'Connell should have been a cousellor
instead of a corn dealer ; that Lord Palmerston should not
have handled samples of grain instead of " touching the
Spanish ;" that William Rathbone's Yankee beef was not
flour, or that Joseph Hume should have omitted, in the
course of his travels, to exchange his " Greek" for a few
cargoes of Odessa wheat ! All men, however, are not born
to be fortunate. All men have not " greatness thrust upon
them," as have not a few of our speculators, in this year of

whig anti-corn-law agitation.
We remember a time—not very long past—when corn
speculators found it somewhat difficult to raise markets to
the precise pitch required ; when it was somewhat difficult to
convince the public, except upon very strong grounds, of the
fact of a deficient harvest ; and still more difficult to induce
it cheerfully to pay the advanced prices demanded for bread
and flour. This year, however—thanks to the exertions of
the whig press, local and metropolitan—the only difficulty
has been in raising prices fast enough to meet the craving
desire of whig consumers for a dear loaf. From all parts of
the country, disastrous accounts of mildew, blight, rain,
flood, and every description of calamity which corn "is heir
to," have poured in upon the lucky speculator in this popu-
lar commodity ; and the " bad weather" prophets, who are
usually to be met with about this season of the year upon
all our corn exchanges, have had nothing to do but cull, out
of the abundant materials at their disposal, the most spicy
paragraphs for their circulars. As the rain came down, corn
and the whig ministry were to go up ; and when so laudable
a consummation was to be effected, it need scarcely be told
how lovingly the speculator and the politician have worked
together, inspired by the chorus sung by a hundred whig
journalists—" The rain it raineth every day !"
The result we need not dilate upon. Some hundred thou-
sand pounds, in good bard gold, will find their way into the
pockets of the gentlemen of Mark-lane, and some hundred
thousand quarters of foreign wheat, at a nominal duty, into
the granaries of England, to be paid for in English gold.
What the English farmer has been doing to permit this

juggle, go prejudicial to his own and the country's interestl,
we know not; but we shrewdly suspect, that he has been
listening more to the representations of those " exclusive
organs" which the Agricultural Association have provided
him with than to the teaching of his own good sense and
observation. Bye and bye we may have a few words on the
subject of these said " organs," which, perhaps, on exami-
nation, may turn out to be quite as much the organs of the
corn speculator as of the farmer.

THE " MANCHESTER GUARDIAN" AND

OURSELVES

We are compelled to defer replying to some remarks of
the Mancheste►• Guardian of Saturday last, which, indeed,
we should have noticed on Tuesday, had they not at that
time escaped our observation.

Our contemporary writes, as is not unusual with him, in
somewhat of a vain• glorious spirit ; and is afraid that the
statement of ours upon which he -comments, " appearing as
it does in a Liverpool paper, where parties connected with
the public press ought to know something about cotton, will
very likely be copied and commented upon as being unques-
tionably true, and will be accepted as fact by that large class
of persons who do not give themselves the trouble of investi-
gating statements of the kind." The public, we doubt not,
will fully appreciate the Guardian's anxiety in behalf of the
class of persons in question, and We dare say are not disposed
to deny that, as in duty bound, he himself ought to be tolera-
bly informed upon any subject of which " cotton" is a com-
ponent part ; but we are inclined ourselves to suspect, that at
the very moment whilst so coolly setting us down as ignorant,
and so flippantly—and somewhat impertinently—impugning,
as mere " assertion," the statement o£ Lord Sandon which
we commented upon, our contemporary was well aware that,
in fact, the statement of the noble lord and our remarks upon
it were strictly correct. We will, however, leave our read-
ers to judge of this ; and for the present only request of our
contemporary to moderate his contempt of us, until he is
certain of our inability to resist so doubty an assailant.