The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1847-08-17 00:00:00

lertu u

THE LIVERPOOL STANDARD.

bringing with them the cheering prospect of abun-
dance. The granaries of the world have been
emptying themselves into the ports of wealthy
England. Every available vessel has been put in
requisition to transport food to our shores. But
the corn speculators still slept on, still doled out
their scanty supply to a hungry and distressed
people, at an immoderate and immodest price—
slept so to the very last, dreaming of storm and
blight, magnifying every genial shower into a flood,
every speck upon an ear of wheat or a potato stalk,
into an evidence of widely-spread and irretrievable
destruction. At length, at the last hour, these
gentlemen are being awakened ; and if their re-
verse be more signal than it might have been,
they have but their own acts to blame for the cir-

cumstance

Greater folly we never witnessed or heard of
than has been displayed in the course of the last
few months by the parties who are now about to
be called upon to suffer. Every disinterested man,
whose fingers were not infected by the touch of
the prevailing idol; every man in the full posses-
sion of his intellect, saw clearly that the pressure
upon our food market was only temporary—that
the vacuum produced by an unfavourable season,
putting aside the interference of Providence to
furnish us with abundance from our own soil,
would soon be filled up to overflowing by the
influx of food from other countries. The American
people, everybody knew, would snatch the husks
from their swine to feed upon, in order to wring
from us dollars in return for their wheat and flour.
The serfs of Russia and Poland, Norway and
Sweden, would vegetate upon tallow and kelp, in
order to get British gold for their wheat and rye.
Germany would sustain itself upon cabbages and
other greenstuffs, in order to share the golden
harvest. The men of Mark-lane, and such as
they, alone were blind to these facts. They alone,
morever, were unable, or refused, to see that the
stocks of a world could not for ever be held over,
and the appetites of a hungry people satisfied only
at famine prices—that bills renewed once or twice
could not be renewed for ever, and that, postpone
it as they might for a season, the crash must come

at last. -It IS at hand

It has commenced; and

whilst we repeat our hope that the destruction of
individual credit and property will not be propor-
tionate to the extent of individual misconduct, we
cannot but fear that it will be great and calamitous.
Whatever may be its extent, however, let it serve
as a warning against the evils of commercial gam-
bling, and the wickedness of inordinate avarice.
Another lesson, too, it may teach those who, so
triumphantly in their own estimation, ask us how
we should have sustained our people under the
operation of the sliding scale : viz., the fact that
speculation under that system is infinitely less
potent in raising the price of a people's food, be-
yond a people's means to purchase, than under a
system of free trade. The speculator for a rise
under the latter has no fears, save of a decline in
prices. He holds to-day in the hope of an additional
shilling per quarter to-morrow; and if prices recede
a shilling, that shilling is the extent of his loss.
Under the sliding scale, he held subject to his
neighbour adopting the opportunity of selling
which he himself rejected. He must, in declining
markets, at once accommodate himself to the cir-
cumstances which warranted that decline ; for, if
he refused, he was liable not only to a loss com-
mensurate with the decline in price but, as well, to
the imposition of an additional duty. Moreover,
in the emergency of very high prices—of prices
only as high as the present—we should under that
system have had free trade to its fullest extent.
So far as we have experienced the workings of our
present law, we are convinced that it holds out to
the capitalist facilities for operating injuriously
upon the interests and comforts of the masses, by
raising and depressing at will the price of their
food, infinitely greater than the law which it sus-
pended. Steadiness of price it obviously cannot
accomplish.

THE POLICE COURT.—Yesterday there were no less
than 148 cases on the police books for hearing, consisting,
for the most part, of drunk and disorderly cases. We
learn that this number exceeds the average by near 50.
IRISH BEGGlNG.—Yesterday a considerable number of
Irish mendicants were brought before the magistrates at
the police-court, charged with begging on Sunday. Several
were discharged on promising to return to Ireland, whilst
_ _ _ . .
tive country

others refusing to be sent back to
were sent to gaol for seven days. The answers from some
of them on being asked to return home, were somewhat
amusing. The reply of one was, " rayther not if I
could help it." He was committed for persisting in his
refusal. Another, who seemed averse to returning home,
was pointedly asked the question, " Will you go home or
to prison ? " when he answered with much characteristic
simplicity, but evidently under the sudden influence of
the feeling of prison restraint, " Faith, I'll go home if
you like."

The I

f Baron nas

Antments o

sing barristers for

circuit:—York.—West Riding with Ponte-
3anchard, Benjamin Boothby, and L. Tem-
West Riding Boroughs, except Ripon, Pon-
Knaresborough.—William Gray, Esq. East
of Nrnrk with KnArpchnrnuoth and