The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1843-06-06 00:00:00

poen! day data work with grange ireapone, and herd
with gimp omelette, (t 1; and we may poAsibly arrive
kwon c aouther di►►e to the E; tr.:No anonutly, by which

Daniel O'Connell—the leadar and agitator of a con

inunity solely dependent upon agricultural pursuits—
has been so prominently mixed up with a party which

seeks to inflict destruction upon agriculture !

We have before us, in the columns of the Illauches-
ter Guardian, a correspondence which throws an im-
portant light upon the position and prospects of the
cotton manufacture of this country. We can afford
space this day for its substance merely ; and may per-
haps in our next give it more in full, and enter into an
enquiry with respect to the degree of credit to be
attached to the views of the writers.

The subject of the correspondence is the recent im-
portation, by Messrs. Barings, of those cotton goods,
the manufacture of the United States, whose seizure
by the Board of Customs excited, recently, some sensa
tion in the mercantile world. A letter, it appears, has
been addressed by the manufacturer of these goods, to
Mr. R. H. Greg, from which, and from the statements
of that gentleman himself, we gather the following
facts. The goods in question are no attempted imita-
tion of any British goods, and no concealment was
sought in their introduction into this country. They
are, in fabric, a stout twill, and have for year's past
been largely exported to the South American markets,
displacing in those markets the produce of British
looms. They. are now being extensively exported to
Canton ; and it is thought may at no very distant pe-
riod be profitably introduced into consumption in the
British market. It is further stated by the American
correspondent of Mr. Greg, that cotton yarn is now
becoming an extensive article of export from the
United States ; and, he maintains, confidently, that, in
a few years, no manufacturing nation will be able to
compete with that country in cotton yarns ranging be-
low No. 30.

These are surely startling facts, well calculated to
awake us from our visions of manufacturing, supre-
macy. The sight of a cotton jacket of American ma-
nufacture upon the hack of a Manchester or a Bolton
weaver, is one which the fathers of the present race of
manufacturers have scarcely anticipated. And yet,
with the greatly reduced rate of wages now paying in
the United States, owing, as we find it stated, to the
low price of food, it is one which we may make up our
minds to witness. We are taxing, most absurdly, the
raw material of such goods about 121 per cent, whilst
we impose a protecting duty upon the manufactured
fabric of only 10 per cent ; and it is less to be won-
dered at that in the heavier and least matured cotton
goods we are undersold in foreign markets, now, than
that we have not, long ago, been met successfully in
those markets and even threatened in our own !

The manufacturing body can see no remedy—none
at least which they think worthy of struggling for—
except in reduction of the wages of the working popu-
lation. "We must have cheaper labour" is the spirit
of the whole of Mr. Greg's communication to the
Guardian. But, we say, let us first see what the
abolition of the cotton duty will do for us ; and then
it may be worth our while to pause and ascertain well
our position before we plunge into those extensive re-
ductions of the price of labour, and that ruinous dis-
couragement W. our native griculture. to which we
are urged. The prosperity which we are thus to bring
about must be shown to us to be more permanent than
we can at present imagine, before we are willing to
enter upon an experiment so vast.

We have been amused of late with some atnazing
discoveries with respect to the management of the
bonded warehotises of this town—the mismanagement,
we should say—as having conduced to the prevalence
of those disastrous fires, which we have recently had
to deplore. In particular, we have been treated, by a
local contemporary, with a description of the extraor-
dinary juxta-position of cotton-bags and turpentine,
resin and inciter matches, and the doings of " cat rier-
pigeons," porters, warehousemen, and others whose
peculiar notions of convenience display themselves in
the placing of lighted tobacco-pipes in the interior of
cotton bales. There is something extremely romantic
in this style of journalism something extremely inte-
resting to the news-loving community, for whose espe-
cial benefit it is perpetrated. A London or a Man-
chester enemy of the growing eminence of this great
port is irresistibly tempted to seize hold of it, as an
evidence that the warehouse owners of Liverpool are
amongst the maddest of the mad ; and that they ought
forthwith to be proscribed, and their important inte-
rests to be sacrificed, for the simple reason that they
are mostly composed of Protestant Conservatives—and
that their -vilification .advances the outcry for bonded
warehouses in Manchester. •

Of course we do not pretend to- say that the ware-
housing system of Liverpool is perfect. We say, ra-
ther, shew us a perfect system of Nv a reh o ase manage-
inent, and we will be hound that it will he adopted.
We admit the unfortunate pre-eminence which this
town has recently acquired as a focus of disastrous
conflagration. But we rather imagine that it may be
accounted for, without attributing such maniacal mis-
management as that which is alleged against our ware-
house owners. We have, in Liverpool, commodities
to stow peculiarly liable -to conflagration, and most
difficult to deal with when once placed within its reach.
Shew us any other port similarly circumstanced ; and
we will compare statistics of conflagration with it for
the past ten years. Cotton, turpentine, tar, and other
similar combustible article's, are .naturally, from our
position and trade, theleading articles of our import,
and furnish the principal articleS warehoused in our
port; and although, perhaps, if we had to commence
anew the erection of • warehouses for such commodi-
ties, we might build them upon a better system, we
have yet to learn that any town in the empire affords
the same facilities—ft they were embraced—for stowing
them with a due regard to their safety.

111-assorted materials are, we are aware, occasionally
placed in too close proximity ; but whose fault is this ?
A warehouse-owner cannot dictate to the proprietor of
any description of produce the choice of the locus in
quo of its stowage. The old system, so much dwelt
upon by our contemporary, was that every merchant
had his own warehouse ; but does every merchant, or
any merchant, deal in articles alt non-combustible, or
all dangerous ? The American merchant, with his
cotton, has other very opposite commodities, which,
under the old system, he would be compelled to ware-
house together; and, as to the lucifer-match fable, all
the world knows that that particular commodity is a
" rara avia in terris" in the commerce of Liver-
pool at least ; and
.witit respect to the " carrier
pigeons," we have yet to learn the system on which
the dock-warehouse infallibles are to conduct their ciwn
infallible scheme: It may be a good one. It may be
a bad one! It may be as theoretically excellent as
dock management is, and as practically bad !
We should not perhaps have referred to this subject
for anything that the opponents of the warehouse-
owners of Liverpool could effect in our own locality.
They are known here—their motives and their animus!
But when we see their emanations of spite received as
orthodox displays of the opinions of the people of
Liverpool in other localities—and those hostile locali-
ties—we feel impelled to enter our protest against the
conclusion which our silence might infer. An exam-
ple of this disposition to argue upon the non-repudia-
tion of Radical attacks upon Conservative interests in
Liverpool, is furnished by the Manchester Guardian of
Saturday last; and to that we now address ourselves.
The Guardian, commenting Nam a letter in our
last, in which the writer complains that Conservatives
should allow,- a party in our dock trust to injure Con-
servative interests within the borough, remarks that
" all this, we think, is very curious, and tends to throw
a pretty strong light upon the working of municipal
affairs in Liverpool." And, after a little blackguardism,
proceeds—" Now, it seems to us that, taking all these
things into account, the warehouse-owners have had
much more titan a fair share of consideration; and the
fruits of the sacrifices made to their interests are be-
ginning to be manifested, in a way which must startle
every man, of whatever polical or municipal party in
Liverpool, who is more interested in the prosperity of
the town than in the ownership of inflammable ware-
houses." The conclusion of the Guardian is that
the establishment of bonding Warehouses in Nlan-
clteonly safeguard for the state of things
complained is
theof ; butr
the circumstance—fortunately—
remainses to be accounted for; viz. that the last two