The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1846-04-21 00:00:00

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TUESDAY MORNING, APRIL 21, 1846.

We give, in another column, as full details as we
could find room for of the important intelligence
from India, brought by the Overland Mail just ar-
rived. Our successes in the East, and their results,
are thus expressively but succinctly summed up in
the Times of yesterday:—
" The Indian war is over. The Sikh army, routed in
four successive battles, is finally broken and dispersed.
Two hundred and twenty cannon captured, and all the
rest surrendered, are sufficient -a arrant that its power is
gone. In fact, there is no longer a hostile force in the
Punjab. Those wide dominions, so lately governed in
strength by Runjeet Singh, have been, in two short
months, invaded and placed at the mercy of a foreign
conqueror. That mercy has not been implored in vain.
The Punjab is again restored to independence, and the
Maharajah of the Sikh nation still reigns at Lahore. The
greater part of the British troops has, ere this, crossed
the Sutlej, and peace is established in India.

We cannot help expressing our regret at the mode
of obstruction by which the heads of the Dock Com-
mittee are met in the Council, in their endeavours
to carry the liberal and extensive measures which
they have brought forward for the improvement of
the Dock Estate, and, by reflection—for all neigh-
bouring bodies and localities, not placed in a rela-
tion of a competing nature, reflect their prosperity
upon each other—of the prosperity of the town.
Increase the efficiency, and consequent cheapness
of the docks of Liverpool, and you draw more ship-
ping to the town, more commerce to the merchant,
more custom to the shopkeeper. The interests of
the town at large are bound up in the prosperity of
the Dock Estate ; the latter pays a large debt in re-
urn to the interests of the town.

The prospect of increasing commerce to the port,
as the effect of the improvement proposed in its
means of accommodating that commerce, and the
necessity of providing for that increased commerce,
to be derived from the extension of communication
inland with localities, now connected with, and
taking their supplies from other ports, have already
been, in many instances, proved, and were further
forcibly illustrated by the Chairman of the Dock
Committee, in the following remarks, with respect,
amongst others, to our future relations with the port
of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. We are about to be pro-
vided, by means of the Liverpool, Manchester, and
Newcastle-upon-Tyne Junction Railway, with an
improved communication with that great northern
port, and the important localities intervening, from
whose commerce we have been hitherto virtually
excluded by the inconvenience of our existing com-
munication. But we must leave Mr. Brarnley
Moore to speak for himself :

Tile increase in the trade of the port must continue to
go on, as it was backed by a rapidly increasing population,
and its means of communication with the interior were
gradually becoming more facile. For instance, at present
there was no communication between Liverpool and New-
castle-upon-Tyne ; but a railway communicati, n was now
projected, and he trusted that it would he successful, and
that it would pay the spirited parties who had taken it up.
At the present time Newcastle was supplied with an im-
mense number of articles from London, which, when the
railway was opened, would be supplied from :Liverpool,
and which had not hitherto been supplied from Liverpool,
because that town was inaccessible from this port except
at a great cost. He had no fear whatever but the com-
merce of Liverpool would go on increasing.
We only hope that all parties will look the ad-
vancing prospects, and probable future require-
ments, fairly in the face.

We direct attention to a very able letter in our
columns this day, addressed by Mr. Isaac Buchanan,
of Glasgow, to Daniel APINTab, Esq., Vice-President
of the Board of Trade, Hamilton, Canada West,
upon the subject of the future position of our
British American Colonies under the operation of
the proposed Free Trade measures of Sir Robert
Peel's Administration. We have been accustomed
to place such implicit credence in those statistical
returns, published by official authority, upon which
the statesmen of this country are in the habit of
basing their arguments upon the subjecf of any
change in the national policy which they may advo-
cate, that Mr. M`Gregor's figures, as to the actual
position of the Canadian, as compared with foreign
trades, which the advocates of the ultra-liberal mea-
sures now in progress represent as so utterly insig-
nificant, are well qualified to startle us, and to in-
duce in us considerable hesitation before we place
implicit credence in official documents and party
statements based upon them. Upon this point we
beg an attentive perusal to that part of Mr. Buchanan's
letter in which he shows, upon the authority of no
less a person than Mr. M'Culloch, the dishonesty of
tte representations of the Maneltester Guardian, in
which that journal asserts that since 1839 there has
been an actual and a large decrease in the shipments
from this conutry to our British American pos-
sessions. Mr. M'Culloch says that, as given in the
43d page of the Appendix to the 44th edition of his
Dictionary—
The gross shipments in 1844 were.
The average, 1839 to 18-14, was. . 52,419,926

Showing an increase of 111 per cent.... £6,164,365
The shipments to British America were, in
1844 .• • •
The average, 1839 to 1814, was ...

3,070,861
2,666,371

Showing an increase of 15 1-Gth per cent. £404487
The Guardian gives a decrease from £3,047,671 in
15.39 to £1,751,211 in 1543, and finds it convenient
to omit 1844 altogether, the preceding year being a
year of depression, the figures relating to which
suited the purpose of his argument. With respect
to the correctness of the figures themselves, Mr.
Buchanan emphatically says—
" Now, I assert, and by the return of the present stea-
mer, I shall expect from the Montreal and Quebec Cus-
tom-houses a verification of my assertion, that INTO THE
PORTS OF MONTREAL AND QUEBEC ALONE THERE HAS
BEEN AS MUCH IMPORTED FROM ENGLAND AS THE
AMOUNT OF THE ABOVE OFFICIAL RETURNS FOR ALL
BRITISH AMERICA !

t• If I am correct, the error of the Government returns I
will amount to neither less nor more than the omission
of an amount equal to the whole trade to every port in
New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward's Island,
and Newfoundland; and these together cannot be far
less than the amount of the trade of Montreal and Que •
bec, or the amount of the whole official returns as above."
Mr. Buchanan appears to have drawn upon him-
self, by his fearless tone and straightforward business
facts, the ire of the advocates of Free Trade, who
would mislead the manufacturing public, especially,
with respect to the tendency of their measures, in
producing not only a social convulsion at home, but
the separation of her most valuable colonies. With
respect to the future course of Canada, under the
operation of these measures, his opinion has been
met by positive denial and such delusive figures as
the above. The following expression of opinion,
with respect to public feeling in British • America
itself—whose population, we should imagine, ought
to be the best judges of their own affairs—coming
from one of the first merchants of Upper Canada,
and a gentleman whom we know to be most guarded
and cautious in his opinions, ought to have more
weight than the flippancy of any Free Trader in the
mother country :•--
"The abolition of all protection on Canadian or Colo-
nial produce in Britain will, ere long, produce a change
in the feelings of the Colonists, and, it may be, in the
mother country also. If the Colonists have no protec-
tion, they will seek to buy where they can best please
themselves ' • and the bond of mutual interest which at
present binds them to Britain will be loosened, and in
time entirely broken ; and the time will come when it
becomes no longer the interest of Britain to retain the
connexion. That time will be very much hastened by
the late changes, and it becomes us to inquire whether
we would continue in business in Canada either as an in-
dependent country or as a State of the Union ; for it
would not surprise me if the present generation even
have to ask themselves such a question."

We presume that the question—what parliament
is to do with the hundreds of railway schemes, the
necessity of getting rid of which is now universally
acknowledged, will shortly be made public. Sensi-
ble and practical men are fast discovering that the
mere permission to a majority of shareholders in
any given line to wind up their own affairs and
abandon their contemplated undertaking, is not the
kind of remedy which wise statesmanship would
have desired. Its operation must be to hold out a
wide field for the display of all kinds of trickery.
It holds out no security to the public that good
schemes, of national importance and interest, will
not be overthrown, and bad schemes, affording no

increase of convenience to the public, carried out.
Nay, it actually tempts this result. Public opinion
has declared itself in favour of the adoption of the
most direct and independent routes between impor-
tant seats of commerce—the most direct routes be-
tween the centres of consumption or production,—
and the ports whose traffic they supply. It has set
its face against the patching and botching system
of the old monopolies. Yet we have in the proposed
measure a weapon which seems to have been ex-
pressly devised to enable the existing great lines to
rid themselves of the more efficient communications,
with whose rivalry they are threatened, and to fas-
ten upon the public, for years to come, the neces-
sity of travelling by their roundabout and extrava-
gantly expensive routes. Amalgamations, and the
formation of peddling branches go on, under this
mode of getting temporarily out of our difficulties ;
the great companies throw the mantle of their pro-
tection and the aid of their capital round a host of
petty schemes, and thus erect barriers against all
further efforts of improvement of the country's
communications ; whilst lines, by which such im-
provement would at once be brought about, are per-
mitted to fall through, without the legislature at-
tempting to canvass their importance and their
comparative value to the country at large.
The principle that men are the best judges of
their own affairs and interests, and of the mode in
which they shall employ their capital, may he cor-
rect enough in the abstract, but there is, surely, a
limit beyond which, for the sake of the community at
large, it should not be carried. By legislating at
all to release speculators and railway projectors from
the effect of their past folly and misconduct, we
acknowledge that the prudence of capital is not to
be implicitly trusted in. We have devised checks
innumerable to protect the national interests and
the national morality against the effect of its fan-
tastic doings. Does a projector offer to darn up
one of our navigable rivers, or to throw a bridge
over an estuary, the Admiralty steps in to check the
invasion of its national usefulne's. And the same
or a similar check might very legitimately be ap-
plied to the carrying out of projects, which as cer-
tainly operate to retard the improvement of the
nation's resources and convenience. It is as ma-
terial, for instance, that Manchester should have
the best possible facilities for bringing its products
to the Mersey for shipment, as that the best channel
should be kept open from the Mersey to the ocean.
And, on this ground, the Legislature itself ought to
take care that the capital, upon which we have to
depend for the formation of such lines of efficient
communication, should not be frittered away
in abortive efforts to patch together particular
existing monopolies. Parliament has a right to say
you shall make the best communication, if you make
any. If- you have over-estimated your means to
make all, you shall not lock up the available amount
of those means in the construction of lines, whose
certain result must be the retarding, if not the in-
definite postponement of the construction of those
which we regard as the most important for public
interests. We want an intelligible guidance, by an
impartial, tribunal of the mode in which capital
should be directed towards railway investments,
and some powers existing in that tribunal to deter-
mine what amount the nation can afford yearly to
devote to them.

The fingers of the community Lave been pretty
well burnt—sufficiently so to serve as a caution for
the future, if any caution could suppress the grasp-
ing spirit of selfish appropriation and eagerness for
gain—but this clumsy mode of enabling us to get
them out of the fire, affords no protection against
the recurrence of similar periods of mania, and con-
sequent embarrassment and stagnation of commerce,
such as that under which the nation is now suffering.
A wise and able government would have grappled
with the whole question. It will have to be grappled
with. The good easy public must neither be left to
the tender mercies of a host of unprincipled pro-
jectors, on every occasion when the national pro-
sperity tempts men to gamble with the superabun-
dance of their means, nor must the prospect of the
country receiving at some future time the largest
possible amount of cheap and efficient communica-
tions for its traffic be postponed, indefinitely, by
allowing the soil to be cut up by a number of abor-
tive schemes, which can never be made efficient and
profitable in themselves, and which must for ever
remain drags upon the successful working of legi-
timate undertakings. We trust that the committees
now sitting may be able to devise some mode of
dealing with the whole question.

It is singular to observe with what energy the
public mind, once roused to a perception of the ex-
istence of abuses or evils, sets itself about the task
of their removal. Thus the people of Liverpool
have been blind to the occurrence of a frightful
amount of mortality, beyond the ordinary rate of !
other towns, less favourably situated by nature,—be-
yond even the rate in those neighbouring manufac-
turing towns which they had been accustomed to
regard as filled with unwholesomeness and pesti-
lence. Their actual position was proclaimed to
them, through the medium of the press, in parlia-
mentary reports, and by a few among the local fa-
culty ; but they were slow to be convinced. They
looked at their noble river, their magnificent docks,
and said it could not be that over such a locality
disease should hang so densely and snatch its vic-
tims so remorselessly. The conviction came at
last. They saw, interspersed amid the thorough-
fares of commerce, the unventilat d courts, and fil-
thy, uncleansed cellars, in which pestilence was en-
gendered ; and they set about the task of their im-
provement
or removal. Whilst thus engaged it was
that their attention became directed to the full
amr,unt of the evil to he encountered ; that they
became aware of the deficiency of ordinary sanatory
precautions and means which had been suffered to
exist; that they had an amount of sewerage totally
incapable of meeting the increased wants of the
town, inefficiently constructed, without plan, and in
parts almost incapable of being worked for the pur-
poses of drainage. They had, moreover, allowed
the supply of the most active and efficient instru-
ment of cleansing—water—to be locked up in the
hands of a few individuals, with power to direct
absolutely its lines and modes of application, and to
dole it out at an exorbitant rate in minimum
quantity to the public.
All this tardy conviction has flashed upon us at
once ; and the efforts making to repair the conse-
quences of past neglect, and rectify past mistakes,
are active as the previous lethargy which led to
them was dense. `re are glad to observe this, be-
cause we feel confident it may be turned to good
purpose for the advancement of the moral as well
as the physical health of the community. It is a
sign that we are in earnest ; that we recognize our
duty to see that all classes, the very poorest as well
as the rich, are allowed to breathe the pure air of
heaven unobstructed, and to have afforded to them
an ample quantity of the most necessary element
for the preservation of health and life. But we
must not go too rashly to work. We must weigh
our means carefully, and attempt only what we are
satisfied that we can accomplish. We have, howe-
ver, no wish to excite a niggardly spirit in those
who are stirring in this good and great work. Our
object is only to remind them that there is a limit
to the power of any communities to accomplish the
best works ; and to urge them to take care that
their available means are judiciously applied to the
carrying out at first of such remediatory measures as
are likely to be the most extensively and perma-
nently useful.
In the mean time, it would be well for whatever
local authority may be intrusted with the important
duty of improving the salubrity of the town, and
the cleanliness and comfort of its population,, to
procure powers and to exercise them rigidly, in
order to prevent the growth of sources of future
mischief, similar to those which they are now called
upon to put down. Whilst engaged in removing
those wretched habitations in the existing locality of
the town, they must see that similar nurseries of
disease are not permitted to be erected in the out-
skirts, and thus to block up and putrify a portion
of those lungs, through which pure currents of air
can alone be drawn into its contre. They must see
that these lungs are kept open, that future wide
thoroughfares from the heart of our population to
the country may be formed, without involving that
enormous outlay and destruction of property which
has hitherto so greatly impeded every attempt at
ventilation.
It might be well, too, if they could direct them-
selves in earnest to some vigorous means to break
through some of those dense masses of building to
be found choking up the access both of air and of
traffic to important localities of the town, and which,
in addition to the public inconvenience they create,
form fertile sources of disease, and, we may add, of
immorality and crime. It is not wide sewerage or
cleansing which can render these localities whole-
some. Air is as important to health and vitality as