The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1848-04-11 00:00:00

TUESDAY MORNING, APRIL 11, 1848.

TZTAT the agitation carried on for the last dozen
Tezree for that fantastic scheme, known as " the
People's Charter," is a movement which has for
a nal objects anarchy and spoliation, will be ac-
inowledged by most persons, who are not them-
selves mixed up in its advocacy. Hence, we have
-ever found that, in periods when the industrial
'portion of our population are in the enjoyment of
--prosperity, Chartism hides its diminished head ;
and its frothy declaimers bawl to empty benches.
The respectable portion of our .working classes
shrink from contact with leaders. whose honesty
they distrust, and of whose objects they have an
indistinct conception ; and even the less con-
siderate mob, composed of idle youths and dis-
solute and dissatisfied people of more mature age,
.refuse to listen to the wild and unsatisfactory
theories which they offer as the substantial agency
by which their social and political condition is to
'be bettered. Hence, at such periods, we are led to
regard the agitation in question as at the worst a
nuisance, too contemptible for the notice of the
Legislature or of the public, whom it annoys with
its brawling and absurdity.
In the present state of things, however, with
R,epublican principles spreading their destructive in-
luence over the Continent of Europe, and with
Irish disaffection meeting us at home, Chartism has
added, and is adding largely to the other difficul-
ties of the country, It possesses an extensive
organization, and leaders sufficiently disposed to
be energetic in mischiee; and unfortunately the
icondition of our working classes, the mass of
whom are unemployed and suffering extreme pri-
vation, is providing those leaders with materials to
operate upon. Hungry men do not ordinarily
res.son very closely. Men who find themselves,
from no fault of their own, de trop in the midst of
a community, of which they have been amongst
tine most effective and useful members, do not very
rigidly scrutinise the characters or the motives of
. those who seek to persuade them that the cause of
their isolation and suffering is to be found in the
term of the institutions under which they are go-
verned. Any change is readily welcomed when
those urged to rush to it feel, or even fancy, that
-their condition cannot he worsened ; and, where
such is the state of things amidst which it has to
work, the most ordinarily contemptible agitation
becomes dangerous. In addition, Chartism has
recently found a potent ally in Repeal; and, thus
backed by the turbulent Irish portion of our popu-
lation, is assuming just now a rather bold front.
It leaders boast openly of their numbers; and
45re now threatening an effort of physical force,
-.which is to overthrow the institutions of the
"country, and establish in their stead a form of
-government which must be Republican in all except
the name.
The Ministry have, wisely we think, determined
to suppress the first overt act of the body to effect
their objects,—the armed procession which was,
yesterday. to march from Kennington Common to
Westminster, to present the Chartist petition to the
House of Commons. Such a procession, or any
.demonstration of physical force attendant upon the
-presentation of a petition, was clearly unconsti-
tutional; and it needed not the raking up of any
-obsolete statute two centuries old to prove it so. It
was a demonstration to overawe the deliberations
-of the Legislature. It was designed to substitute
the will of the mob of London, reinforced by a few
irresponsible delegates from other towns, for the
opinions of the constituencies of the whole empire,
as represented by the 658 members whom they
have returned to Parliament to legislate for them.
The introduction, moreover, of such a procession
into the heart of the metropolis, and into the neig-
bourhood of the public offices, attended as it would
have been by some ten or twenty thousand of the
thieves of London, eager to create an occasion for
plunder, could not be otherwise than dangerous to
the public peace and to the security of property;
and possibly, whilst we write, some disturbances
may even have resulted from the steps taken for
its suppression. Such suppression, however, was
clearly a duty of the Government ; a measure of
protection to the Legislature from mob dictation,
which is in accordance with the whole spirit of the
daritish constitution.
But we would not have that government or
parliament to imagine that, having, successfully,
'eve trust, asserted the supremacy of the law over
brute force, they have removed the source from
which the evil anticipated might have arisen.
Chartism, we repeat, is in itself contemptible. We
doubt if one in a hundred of the men and unruly
lads, who were to meet yesterday on Kennington
Common, and proceed to dictate a constitution for
this great empire, know what it means. It is not
Chartism, however, which has to be got rid of,
'either by legislative concession or by the executive
power, but the feeling existing in the minds of a
large mass of the people, which leads them to
tolerate and listen to its brawling absurdity.
It cannot be concealed that there is a large
amount of discontent smouldering in the breasts of
the working classes throughout Great Britain, and
only waiting for some master mind, or some unfor-
tunate mischance, to cause it to burst into a flame.
At present this feeling is directing itself towards
the removal of local and class grievances. In our
own town, for instance, it is mooting, and very
lastly, an alteration of our porterage system, and a
mitigation or removal of the monopoly of our dock
trustees ; and in other towns, it is directed against a
reduction of wages and oppressive trade regula-
tions. But it is fast assuming the character of a
.rooted conviction in the popular mind that the con-
dition of the operative is too little cared for, either
by the classes above them or by the legislature.
The operative masses feel that every recent change
in the policy of the country has failed to raise
their condition ; that even the boasted free trade
system has lamentably failed in producing the re-
sults which were promised from it; that the scale
of remuneration for the labourer and the artisan is
year by year being decreased, and that year by year
some item is being withdrawn from the comforts
which they formerly enjoyed. In every direction
they see the screw of capital and competition ap-
plied ; profits cut down until there is no room for
the skilled workman to live ; the minor branches of
trade monopolized by the leviathan houses—the
wholesale dealer becoming a retailer—and, in every
'direction, the intermediate profits, upon which
thousands of industrious families lived reputably
and in comfort, being either absorbed or destroyed
altogether. The merchant and the manufacturer
no longer distributes his patronage amongst some
dozen of his humbler fellow traders. He is sup-
plied by contract with everything he wants, too
often by desperate adventurers, at prices which
neither leave room for fair wage for the workman
nor a legitimately acquired profit to the parties
themselves. Our public bodies and our railway.
.and other companies are all supplied on this sys-
tem, and are rapidly becoming traders and manu-
facturers as well.
Is it to he wondered at, under such circum-
stances, the working classes are becoming dissatis-
fied with their position, and hopeless with respect
to the prospects which are before them ? Is it to
be wondered at that they are fast becoming food
for the Agitator and the Demagogue, when even
the classes immediately above them—their former
employers—are only able to see a chance of being
rendered able to live by reduction of expenditure
in every direction, and by an extensive remission
or change in our system of taxation ? And it
would not at all surprise us if both these classes
should at no distant date be compelled to unite
their strength in an imperative demand for such a
change in the management of the affairs of the
country as will be obviously wanted by both, un-
less some providential accident occurs to restore a
snore healthy state of things. Nay, it would
scarcely be wondered at if such demand were to be
for a change in the constitution of the legislature
itself; for it is really difficult to see how a con-
tindation of the paltry trifling, and the contemp-
tuous insult, with which thus far the parliament of
1848 has dealt with the universal distress of the
nation—the recklessness with which it has wasted
the public time upon Jew Bills and Irish debates,
in the regulation of its own kitchen affairs and
other foolery, whilst commerce has been suspended
aud industry starving ; and its refusal to listen to
the almost unanimous demand of the trading
classes for an equalization of taxation, whilst the
public burthens are kept up at their maximum—
con lead to any other result.

UNDER ordinary circumstances, the course
•-nnursued by the Chairman of the Water Committee,
5.4 r. Ambrose Lace, at the last Council meeting,
st postponing the confirmation of that part of their