The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1833-02-01 00:00:00

THE WHIG MINISTRY.

Lord Grey is beginning to taste the sweets of his li-
beral system. His friends are doing exactly what every
body knew they would do—and nothing but the assist-
ance of the Conservatiye.party can rescue him from their
clutches ;—they have him, and they hold him ; and at
present he puts a o-ood face upon it, and talks of being
prepared to go " all, lengths."
Mr. Stanley, however, whose abilities are of a much
higher class than those of most of his colleagues, has
told the country that nothing but the support and coun-
tenance of the Conservatives can enable the ministers to
beat the radicals; and this he said at nearly the same
moment in which the Right Honourable Mr. Thomson
was advocating the most violently nitra-radical principles,
and the adoption of the ballot; and certain it is, that
Mr. Thomson- has since gone about, saying that his
speech upon the occasion was approved and sanctioned
lay Lord Grey—a fact which, without meaning in the
slightest degree to impugn Mr. Thomson's veracity, we
the more readily believe, because the speech, which was
no. doubt cooked by the Premier, and repeated by his
son at Aylesbury, was by far the strongest and most un-
equivocal manifesto yet exhibited to the country.
The strange part of all this conduct is, that Lord
Grey haS been now upwards of half a century constantly
mixed up in public and official life, and must know that
with a House. of Commons such as he has contriVed to
get together, no Government can be carried on. He
never could have been so blind as not to anticipate what
has already come to pass, or expect that lie could stand
a. 4 a Minister against the assaults of his friends, when
he had given them power and importance enough to
govern him.
Let him look at the state of the case—a day scarcely
msses without the arrival of a deputation from some
glass of people at the different departmental offices ' • em-
boldened by the first great attack upon his Lordship's
hOu.se by Mr. Place and his friends; every clique of men
who fancy their own personal interests are likely to be
injured or neglected, send. off half a dozen of the most
presentable members of their body to debate questions
of state policy with the Government: The other day,
when Sir John Cam Hobhouse in communicating with a
deputation of this sort entered into a kind of negociation,
and suggested that Ministers would endeavour to take
off some of the assessed taxes, the members unanimously
shouted, " No—all :" nor could he pacify them or induce
them to listen to anything like a modification of their de-
Mantis. •

`Lord Grey, we repeat, must have always been aware
that thiS must come to be the case, and he must, of all
men, be aware that the wholesale abolition of taxes is an
impracticability. Lord Grey was one of the members of
that -Administration, who, having denounced Mr. Pitt's
income tax as the. most tyrannical and oppressive tax in
the world, doubled it as a Property Tax as soon as they
came into office, and it is quite clear that if the dele-
gates :of England. force him to repeal all the Assessed
raxes, he must come to some similar measure to pro-
vide for the expenditure of the country.
As for the Whig opinion of taxation, some little no-
tion may be acquired of it by a perusal of the thirty-
nine resolutions moved by Lord Henry Petty in the
HUI:Se of Commons, on the 31st of March, 1806, and
the, speeches by which he enforced and recommended
them. Nor can we omit noticing his Lordship's declared
opinion, upon the Sinking Fund, delivered on the 28th
of :M u that year—his Lordship said :
"It was impossibie for him to make a better culogium on the