The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1849-08-21 00:00:00

INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER.

In our observation of those violent storms which, from
time to time, sweep over the face of the natural world,
we most frequently lose sight of all save the aggregate of
the havoc committed. We have before us only a dark
and indistinctly-traced panorama of evil ; of the fruits of
industry snatched from the hands which toiled to create
them ; of beautiful spots of the earth blighted and de-
faced ; of wrecks of once stately monuments of the power
and genius of man drifting helplessly shoreward, the sport
of the wrathful waters, which they lately breasted in their
pride, mingled perchance with a passing thought of the
agonised and despairing struggles of those, who have
gone down to their last home beneath their treacherous
element. We regard, in our uninquiring selfishness.
only the sum of the calamity which has befallen our
fellow-creatures ; and rarely direct our vision more closely
to the hearths made desolate, or to the throbbing brows
and crushed hearts of those left behind, upon whom the
weight of the affliction has fallen. And thus it is also
with respect to the note we take of the 2onvulsions which
occasionally visit our social world—of those crises and
reverses which, ever and anon, throw their black shadows
over our industrial and commercial system. We hear of
the• fall of some commercial leviathan, or some too-
aspiring trader; and sermonise coldly over the evils of
" undue speculation," or perhaps congratulate ourselves
that, these men having been swept down, more room will
be loft for our humbler exertions in the pursuit of com-
petence or wealth ; but here we stop short. The victims
have fallen. Their place in the social world knows them
no more ; and that suffices us. We neither care to trace
the steps of their fall, nor to contemplate them as they
mingle, heart-broken and humbled, amongst the mass, to
whose level they have been cast down.
One of these social crises has just passed over our
heads—or ought we not rather to say that it is, at this
moment, afflicting us ?—for, although it has been already
fertile enough in ruin and disaster, its pressure is yet
heavy upon thousands in every class of the community.
The hurricane has swept down the lofty turrets, the tall
pillars, the gilded and glaring excrescences, the lath-and-
plaster work of our commercial fabric ; and it is now busy
with the more solid buttresses, and the humble plants
and shrubs, which have twined round its basement, or
grown beneath its shadow and shelter. The merchant,
the fabled millionaire, and the gambling speculator—the
men who would be rich in a day—have been prostrated ;
and the honest and cautions trader, the shopkeeper, and
the artizan, are now suffering in the general prostration
of credit and of industry. In the following hasty sketches,
we purpose admitting our readers behind that veil of
secret disappointment and suffering, which the public are
seldom permitted to enter; and it our " o'er-true tale"
may appear to some to be exaggerated, and may appear
to others to relate to a class too humble—too near to the
foot of the social edifice—to attract any large amount of
sympathy, or to be of any serious consideration, with
respect to its bearing upon questions of national policy,
we congratulate the former upon their practical immunity
from contact with the full sum of the world's wretched.
ness, and hope to satisfy the latter that no class is so
humble as to be beneath the fostering care of the really
wise and Christian statesman. We disclaim, however,
any intention, in the pursuance of our task, of endeavour-
ing to influence political conclusions by the sidewind
instrumentality of a tale. Our business is only with facts
and with human nature ; and we leave to others to draw
conclusions from these, if they choose.