The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1833-04-16 00:00:00

concern far more than it is ours. Honour and disgrace,
like Cato's, bane and antidote, are " both before him ;"
and it will depend upon himself whether he shall win fame
and fair renown-,—whether he shall reap the thanks of a
grateful country—whether justice and charity shall meet
together and smile upon his work; or whether—which
God avert I—his attempt shall fail, and end in the ruin of
himself and others,—in the destruction of the colonies,
and the demoralization and destitution of 800,000 negro
labourers, in which case he and his coadjutors, the au-
thors and instigators, the prompters and actors, will even-
tually meet their just award, for they—

" -loubly dying shall go down
To the vile earth from which they sprung
Unwept, unhonoured, and unsung."

THE country is every day becoming more sick of his
Majesty's ministers. Independent of the delusions which
have been practised at home to hoodwink the people, and
make them the unconscious instruments of whig rapacity,
the policy which has been pursued abroad is of such a
nature as to call down on the government the most un-
sparing reprehension. There is not a solitary spot on
the map of the world where a British diplomatist has re-
cently been stationed, that does not exhibit the marks of
English folly. From Constantinople to Oporto, from
Algiers to Brussels, and frOm Vienna to Madrid, we be-
hold nothing but incapacity—fruitless missions, absurd.
negotiations, rejected propositions, and failures _of all
kinds, that are too serious to be merely ridiculous.
To a calm observer it must be matter of astonishment,
considering the commercial relations of this country, and
the momentous interests involved, to contemplate the
treatment which the people of Holland have experienced
at our hands—a people who never injured us—a people
with whom we traded peacefully and profitably—whose
king has given us no offence or ground of quarrel—and
who, up to this hour, conscious of the justice of his cause,
has evinced no retaliatory spirit for the insults heaped
upon him and his representatives, or for the hostile ag-
gressions and acts of plunder committed upon his loyal
subjects. All the magnanimity, as well as the justice,
is on the side of the King of Holland ; while, on the part
of the cabinets of Paris and London, we perceive nothing
but duplicity, illiberality, intrigue, and domineering op-
pression. We see the powerful trampling upon the weak,
and spoliating the defenceless—the royal navy of Eng-
land preying upon Dutch merchantmen—and those ships,
which once bore the thunder of England under the flag
of Nelson, capturing fishing-boats, and showing their
guns to a harmless, quaker-looking schooner, with no-
thing on board but dried fish or drier cheeses. The de-
velopement of these contemptible proceedings, and the
thousand other acts of folly and caprice, connected there-
with, will, at no distant day, form a memorable chapter
in the history of England. If there had been among the
whigs, or among that worthless clique which is considered
the elite of the red tape school, and composed of renegade
toriesof such men as Palmerston, Grant, and the new
made Lord of Ripon ;—had there been, we say, among
these people one single individual with the slightest pre-
tension to the character, or with what is vulgarly called
the gumption of even a fifth rate statesman, these errors
and outrages would not have been permitted,—the fame
of England would not have been tarnished, as it now un-
questionably is, and the affairs of Holland and Belgium
would long since have been settled in an amicable and
honourable way. For more than two years have these
negotiations been pending,—the citadel of Antwerp has
been battered to pieces—hundreds of brave men have pe_
risked—thou sands of families have been reduced to des-
titution—and a once flourishing city has been deserted
by its opulent inhabitants, and is now fast falling into
decay,—and after all these deeds of blood and other ca-
lamities, we defy any man to prove that the contending
parties have yet agreed upon a single definite propo-
sition. And who is to blame ? The conventional
powers have tried coercion and have failed. They
have attempted to mediate, and the self-constituted
mediators have disagreed among themselves. They
have pillaged and pirated without approaching one
inch nearer their object. Belgium is dissatisfied and an
unrecognised King sits upon a tottering throne, living
upon the enormous pension which he draws from the
overtaxed people of England. He is merely a broom-
stick in the hands of France, which France will use or
burn, ere long, just as it suits her frenzy or her caprice.
Belgium, in short, i 6, in every respect, a province of
France, and a convenient entrepot between Paris and the
banks of the Rhine. It may be the interest of Louis
Philip to nold that country, even by the bands of mar-
riage ; but it is the interest of England that it should be
held by the Dutch, seeing that it has not the means of '
maintaining its own independence. At any rate it is in
the highest degree impolitic that the people of England
should be excluded from the trade with Hollantl, merely
tp promote the selfish views of the.Hoiue 'of Orleans.

But the same ambiguous and indefensible policy ani •
mates the British cabinet in their conduct towards Mi-
guel of Portugal. By what claim do Louis Philip, and
Leopold of Saxe Coburg, hold the respective Crowns of
Yrance and Belgium ? Is it not by the will of the peo-
ple ? They have been called into sovereign existence by
force trampling upon right—by a three-days' revolution
in the one country, and a playhouse row in the other—
and by nothing else ; and the same power that exalted
them is heartily tired of their rule, and half disposed to
reduce them to their original condition. These are the
Citizen Sovereigns whom it has pleased the Majesty and
the Ministers of England to recognise.

Now, we will not do Don Miguel the injustice to
admit that he has no better claim to the throne of
Portugal, than Louis Philip has to that of France, or
Leopold to that of Belgium, for we believe he has a much
better claim. He is not only the 'king de jure, but also
the king de facto. The people of Portugal are almost
to one man in his favour, and yet he is not recognised
by the British government. Do we not see the spirit
of faction in all this, without the slightest regard to
the principles of justice ? The demagogues of all na.
tions—the expatriated swindlers of every country-40-
4)an jobbers and money gamblers from all the Ex-