The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1846-03-31 00:00:00

t.

effect upon their equanimity. The ancestors of the •
present generation were favored by Providence with
the possession of a noble river, capable of being
made the channel of our vast traffic with the
Western world. By the exercise of ordinary saga-
city and forethought on the part of its citizens,
Chester might perhaps have been the modern Tyre,
and Liverpool have been doomed to remain the ob-
scure fishing hamlet of two centuries ago. These
qualities, however, existed in a negative quantity on
the banks of the Dee. The Cestrians were not
sharp people, such as we find busy in creating
ports and building towns in our own locality in the
present day. They slept at their posts. In an evil
hour they allowed the most necessary commodity
for a great port, water, to be abstracted from them,
their noble estuary to be dammed up into a mise-
rable canal, and obstructions to be erected upon
their river, whose effect is to cause the rapid silting
up of what remains to them of a navigable channel
to the sea Since the commission of these fatal 1
oversights, they have been afflicted with periodical
awakenings, not for the purpose of lamenting past
neglect, but of indulging in the day dreams of once
more converting land into water space, and seeing
fleets of merchants vessels floating where sheep
and cattle are now grazing in pasture or in clover.
During the past month, we have observed one of
these awakenings, caused by the attempts of some
naughty railway people to interfere with a river,
which Chester has so signally displayed its inability
to employ for any useful purpose to the great com-
mercial interests of the country. The great mi-
neral proprietors of Flintshire and North Wales, re-
cognising the important effect of railway communi-
cation in developing the resources of the country,
and facilitating the approach to the great marts of
export and consumption, have taken up the project
of crossing the Dee at King's Ferry, and carrying a
railway to the river Mersey; and Chester is forth-
with in arms to resist the incroachment, although
the line in question—the Mold Junction—effects a
saving of nine miles to all who travel from this port
to Ireland via Holyhead. The Board of Admiralty
is appealed to, engineers are called in, and meetings
are being held to declare, in effect, that the produce
of North Wales must not approach the markets of
Liverpool and the manufacturing districts, without
paying tribute to the "ancient city." More than
this, our neighbours are very profuse in their impu-
tatims of unworthy motives against- those who, so
very naturally, propose to effect for themselves what
Chester has never seriously attempted to effect \for
them. One of its local organs, we observe, refers
to the promoters of one of the railways proposing to
cross the Dee as " parties who have personal and
pecuniary objects solely in view, and care nothing
whose interests they sacrifice if they can serve their
own." This is really very childish, and the imputa-
tions unworthy of serious notice. The inhabitants
of Chester, in stickling for the unimpeded naviga-
tion of their river, contemplate the very same " per-
sonal and pecuniary objects" which they hold to be
a crime in others. They say, we have railway com-
munications, of which Chester is the centre, to the
Potteries, to Manchester, to Liverpool, and Birken-
head; and we want you to use them and aggrandise
our city. Their opponents say, we had rather go
direct, if you please. The animus of both is alike;
but in pursuing it Chester is inert, whilst the pro-
moters of the Mold Junction and other lines across
the Dee are active.

It certainly appears to us that, in approaching the
board of admiralty to press their retarding efforts,
our neighbours have a singularly unfortunate case
to present. We should be the first to deprecate
injurious interference with any tidal river. But, in
the case of one at least of these railways, we can see
no injurious effect to be feared ; and the interference
of the admiralty now would come too late, and ought
to be viewed as a calamity rather than otherwise.
There is no merchant traffic at present going up the
Dee to Chester, with which a well constructed hri-ige
at King's ferry would interfere. The Marquis of
Westminster himself admitted at the meeting held
in Chester to petition the admiralty, that the dtpth
of the channel, contracted by the Dee company to
be kept at fifteen feet up to the city, is now only
twelve feet ; and we know that little beyond flats
now use the passage. That board, alive as it is to
matters connected with the preservation of our tidal
rivers in a state of efficiency, but yet regarding the
important objects to he advanced by opening out the
mineral districts of North-Wales to Manchester and
Liverpool, will surely not interpose to humour the
empty dream indulged in by the citizens of Chester
of opposing the operations of nature herself, and
converting into a port what is fast becoming an in-
land and very unimportant town. Schemes of great
public utility must not thus be obstructed. A little
local soreness may be looked for and pardoned, and
perhaps a few passing explosions of vituperative
humour... The mere interests of Chester, however,
are not to be balanced against those of an entire
country, even to indulge a community to whom their
once noble river has been, for a century past, like a•
court sword by the side of a 'prentice boy, embar-
rassing rather than useful.