The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1848-08-01 00:00:00

TO ADVERTISERS.

We beg respectfully to call the attention of
Merchants, Brokers, Auctioneers, and others,
to the important fact that the
LIVERPOOL STANDARD
IS NOW THE
ONLY NEWSPAPER
PUBLISHED WEEKLY ON TUESDAY,

which can be read on that day by the thousands
of Manufacturers and others attending
THE TUESDAY'S MARKET IN
MANCHESTER.
The STANDARD is taken at all the Newsrooms
and respectable Inns in that town and the
surrounding manufacturing district.
A SECOND EDITION is published at Half-past
Two, in time for the North Mails, containing the
MARKETS, and any news of importance that
may arrive in the course of the morning.

Ebr kibtrpoot ittanbarb.

TUESDAY MORNING, AUG. 1, 1848.

WE do not go all the length of maintaining that
co good can come out of the advocacy of a politi-
cal opponent. On the contrary, we are satisfied
that there was a great deal of truth in the charges,
brought on Wednesday night by Sir Wm. Moles-
worth, against the administration of affairs by the
Colonial Office; and some truth, too, in the views
of the .hon. baronet. Our colonial affairs have been
sadly mismanaged. Our colonists have been deli-
vered over to the tender mercies of a succession of
very crotchetty people ; and their interests have
suffered very materially in consequence. We have
denied to many of our colonies, quite equal to bear
the expense, those constitutional rights which every
Englishman seeks to attain ; and the result has
been that they have remained a burthen upon the
mother country, when they might have been made
a source of strength ; that colonial society has been
seriously deteriorated in its tone and feeling, and
the most beneficial sort of colonisation—that of men
possessed of commercial enterprise and capital—has
been retarded.

The respectable colonist, under the operation of
our present colonial system, is a grumbler from the
very first hour in which he sets his foot upon the
land of his adoption. He sets out with the notion
that he is to be powerfully aided by the Colonial
Offir* ; that he is to be petted, dandled into pros-
perity ; and he finds when be reaches there that he
has ceased altogether to he an object of considera-
tion. There is a Governor, it is true; an expensive
staff; a court, and an aristocracy, into which he
may not be admitted ; and an opposition party,
from contact with whom his feelings shrink, the
sole end and practice of such party being to revile
and cavil at the Government policy. He cannot
address the Colonial office; and, if he did, would
probably not he favoured with any notice of his
communications. Yet lie finds his arrangements
and expectations constantly interfered with by the
orders of that office, concocted generally in utter
ignorance of colonial wants, and changed as often
as the government of the mother country is handed
over from Whig to Conservative, and vice versa".
The consequence is natural. He becomes disaf-
fected, dissatisfied with his position; his energy
and enthusiasm fail him, and, along with them, his
value as a member of the community into which
he has thrown himself.

But the worst feature of the system is its expen-
aiveness. In some of our younger colonies, to
which we are looking to secure consumers of our
manufactures and other products, it is found that
the mother country is paying 9s. to 12s. in the
pound as the expense of government and protec-
tion. At the Cape, for instance, we find in the
last public balance-sheet an item of £1,000,000 for
the suppression of the Caffre war; and probably
the whole amount expended in this colony will not
fall far short of £2,000,000. Now it is not to be
supposed that conflicts of this character would con-
tinue to be provoke(' if the local government was
more largely administered by the colonists them-
selves, and the national treasury was less accessible
for payment of their cost. A large and expensive
staff might be cut down to a reasonable limit in
nearly every one of our minor colonies. A host of
inefficient secretaries and attaches, pets of the Co-
lonial Office or the Horse Guards, might be ex-
changed for less expensive and more efficient ser-
vants—men intimately acquainted with the wants
of those colonies, and deeply interested in husband-
ing their resources.
It is perhaps unfortunate that a subject of such
importance as that of Colonial Reform should have
fallen into the hands of such a member as Sir Wm.
Molesworth, whose views are rather extreme, and
whose opinions as to the value of colonies at all are
of the utilitarian school—who looks at the question
rather as one of pounds, shillings, and pence, of
bales of cotton goods and casks of hardware, rather
than as affecting the national greatness ; but we
must at least thank him for having thrown a flood
of light upon the evil working of the system. The
public and parliament must now see the necessity
of a prompt and extensive movement. We must
cease to allow these noble possessions to be alien-
ated from us, and their interests to be tampered
with, by an irresponsible and an incapable office;
and prepare to bestow upon them that boon which
Englishmen in every quarter of the globe value
most highly—the right of self-government. No-
thing less than this can diminish their costliness to
the nation, and thus neutralise the most powerful
weapon of those amongst our ultra-liberal politi-
cians, whose aim is to throw away our colonies
altogether.