The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1844-10-01 00:00:00

over their Protestant fellow-countrymen—will be-
come the cry of a nation.
We regret the policy on the part of our brother
Conservatives in Ireland, which is operating to
bring about a consummation so much to be feared.
We regret, more than all, the temper which ap-
pears to have dictated such policy, and which, if
encouraged, will throw the loyal Protestants of that
country into the hands of O'Connell and of Rome,
to serve as blind instruments for working out their
insidious designs. It is quite true that such men as
1)r. Maunsell, Alderman Butt, and• their associates
in this new movement, have had infinite reason of
late years to be dissatisfied with the acts of the legis-
lature as it exists. It is true, and lamentable, that
the prospects of the Irish Protestants are well nigh
as dark as the former gentleman has painted them ;
and that, of the only two of their cherished institu-
tions—their University an•l their Established
Church—no reflecting man will engage that the
first " will not within a year be thrown as a sop to
the monster of agitation," or that, this being
effected, " their Church as a national establishment
can survive." But it is weak and unworthy of these
men, who have fought so nobly through long years
of menace and persecution for the maintenance of
their Protestant institutions and of the British con.
nexion, to rush now, in a moment of passion and
resentment—the result of expectations disappointed
and trust abused—into a course so rash and unad-
vised as this proposal of a migratory Parliament,
which can only tend to encourage the ulterior hopes
of repealers and rebels, without conferring one ad-
vantage upon the great mass of their fellow coun-
trymen. It is to be deeply deplored that, by such
men, a step should be taken which is already
weakening the confidence and sympathy ever ex-
tended to them by the Protestants of England, and
which, if followed up, must produce in their minds
distrust and total alienation.

We cannot bring ourselves to believe that Dr.
Maunsell is himself seriously persuaded of the
feasibility of his plan, or its real advantages to Ire-
land. He says that it is feasible, because it has been
tried before—because Parliaments have been held
" at Oxford, York, Trim, and even at the Borough
of Swords." No doubt such things have been,
and the members of such Parliaments have debated
in the steel cap and morion, breast plates and thigh
plates, with sword in belt, and spur on heel; but a
practice, the prompting solely or mainly of the
necessity of the times, can scarcely be urged as a
precedent for adoption now. The machinery of
legislation now is too cumbrous to become ambula-
tory. A Prime Minister cannot carry about with
him, either Whitehall or the Treasury; the Chan-
cellor cannot remove either the Bank or the Ex-
chequer ; the Board of Trade, the Horse Guards,
the Admiralty, Somerset House, and the India
House, are fixtures too inseparably connected with
the daily working of Government to be dispensed
with. Feasibility in the plan, therefore, there is
none.

And, with respect to its real advantages to the
great mass of the people of Ireland, we must con-
fess that we are not at all satisfied ; and especially
we are sceptical with respect to its advantages to
Protestant interests in that country. Dr. Maunsell,
indeed, tells us that the plan "could not render the
condition of Irish Protestants worse than it is ;" that
"it would enable Englishmen to learn, what they do
not now know, the actual position of Protestants in
Ireland"—assertions all of very questionable truth
or probability. But the conclusion that with a British
parliament sitting in Dublin, within hearing of the
fulminations which weekly issue from the Concilia-
tion Hall, and within reach of the violence and in-
timidation of the mobs which form the staff of the
great agitator, a greater weight "would be given" to
Protestant interests by a government which has
conceded so much to the pressure from without,
we cannot believe at all. It is totally beyond the
range of our powers of digestion.
It may be very convenient to the lawyers of Dub-
lin to have, as Dr. Maunsell remarks, "the field of
imperial parliamentary practice thrown open to
them," to the physicians to have " the squares of
Dublin filled with wealthy patients," and to the
tradesmen of Dublin " to have their profits and their
business quadrupled." A few of these anticipated
benefits might even stray beyond the liberties—in
about the proportion of the half-pennyworth of
bread to the two gallons of sack in Sir John Fal-
staff's Tavern Bill ;—an increased amount of the
capital of Great Britain might even find its way into
Ireland, as the result of this measure—if it would
allay that agitation which alone prevents the intro-
duction of such capital ;—but, with such slender
prospects of advantage to the empire, depending, too,
upon so many "ifs," it is not at all likely that Great
Britain can ever submit to a concession, fraught
with such vast inconveniences to herself, and which
Ireland has not the shadow of a title to ask for.

Upon every ground, then, we deprecate this pro-
posal, and the temper in which we fear it is made.
However ingenuity may gloss it over, it is a move-
ment in the direction of repeal, perilous to Ireland
herself, and doubly so to the little that is left of her
Protestant character. Let our loyal fellow-country-
men throw from them such idle crotchets ; let them
rally once more around those institutions, which in
times past they have so nobly defended; and they
will not ultimately be deserted of help. Or should
the worst even come : should the light of Protestant
liberty for a brief period be permitted to be
obscured in their native land : let it not be said that
to protestant rashness and passion an issue so dis-
astrous must be attributable ! Let it not be sung
of our bleeding and prostrate constitution ; by the
Protestant Poet of an after day :
. _

" So the struck Eagle, stretched upon the plain,
No more through rolling clouds to soar again,
Viewed his own feather in the fatal dart,
And winged the shaft that quivered in his heart ;
Keen were his pangs, but keener far to feel
He nursed the pinion which impelled the steel;
While the same pl mage that had warmed his nest,
Drank the last life-drop of his bleeding breast I"
rlLet the rain fall,if it is the divine will ; but, how-
ever deeply implicated may be those of timid and
time-serving statesmen, let our hands be clean !

We are compelled, much against our inclination,
to return to the que tion now agitated between the
Watch Committee and the Magistrates of our bo-
rough, which since our last has assumed a slightly
changed aspect ; but we must first set ourselves
right with respect to an alleged misstatement in our
last. We there asserted, because we understood such
to be the act, that the opinion of Mr. Crompton
was upon a case submitted by the Magistrates, and
therefore one which must have been satisfactory to
Mr. Rushton. This representation was contradicted
by our contemporaries the Mercury and the Journal;
and by the former in these very polite terms, redo-
lent of anything but kid gloves and lavender water :

"It is not true. We have already answered the
question decidedly. The magistrates have neither pre-
pared, directed, nor seen any ease intended to be submitted
to counsel. The assertion is utterly false ;itisa -, in
plain speech : that is, it is an assertion of the Orange
Standard; this will be understood at once."

After this emphatic and very "plain" contradiction,
given in so gentlemanly a spirit, we were bound to
conclude that we had been in error, and were fully
prepared to retract our statement. It occurred to
us, however, yesterday, after perusing the opinions
of Messrs. Erie and Crompton, (which, with those
of Messrs. Jervis and Vaughan Williams, the Li-
verpool Journal had been " enabled by the kind
courtesy of the Mayor" to give at length to the
world,) that by an application to the proper quarter
we might possibly be able to see the case upon which
these new opinions, and especially a subsidiary one
by Mr. Erie, which for the first time we noticed in
the columns of the Journal, had been given. We
applied, therefore, to a member of the Watch Com-
mittee ; and, to our great surprise, learned that we
had been nearer the truth than we imagined with
respect to the mode in which these opinions had
been procured. Up to the moment of our applica-
tion, the Watch Committee had never seen the
opinions, except in the columns of the Journal;
and at the hour of writing this, they have never
had submitted to them the cases upon which they
were taken, and which we are enabled, to state dis-
tinctly, were submitted with the Committee's consent,
but with no further implication, to satisfy some
doubts of the Town-Clerk himself, and an objection
of Mr. Rushton that, in the former cases, the clause
in the act (No. 77) upon which he mainly relied, had
not been brought prominently enough before the
notice of counsel. So far, then, there was prima
facie ground for believing that the opinions were
taken on behalf of the Magistrates ; and certainly
something very like a right of ownership, on the
part of the Magistrates, was exercised over them by
the Mayor, in handing them over to the Journal
for publication before they had been submitted to
the Committee by whom it is alleged they were
taken, and who, it seems, will have to pay for them.
We leave to the Watch Committee to consider