The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1844-04-23 00:00:00

THE LATE WHIG-RADICAL OVERTHROW.

The Mercury is really an amusing scribe—as amusing
when in the tragic vein as when seriously proposing to be
comic. Who could have thought that a man could be
funny when chronicling the defeat of his own party ?
And yet Mercury is so funny upon this dolorous subject,
that he has actually cost a fat friend of ours a button of
his waistcoat, and, we fear, shaken the sides of many of
his own acquaintance.

Our contemporary complains that, by something like
trickery,—how irresistibly prone tricksters are to impute
their own practices to others l—the poll on Friday morn-
ing was closed so very suddenly, that numbers of the
Radical faction were deprived of the opportunity of re-
cording their votes, and the world of forming an accurate
judgment with respect to the strength and influence of
that faction in Liverpool. At this circumstance we are
ourselves somewhat grieved. We should have wished to
see the constituency polled out; and, notwithstanding
our contemporary's affected dissatisfaction, and imputa-
tion of trickery to the Conservative party, we suspect
that, if trickery there were at all, it was on the Radical
side. The Mercury and all his friends knew that the
poll would be closed, whenever the prescribed interval
should elapse without a vote being tendered; and yet
they permitted that interval to elapse. Why did they do
so ? Manifestly because the " two hundred of our
friends," of whom the Mercury swaggered, were only
voters in the clouds, or would not trouble themselves to
move in so purely factions a quarrel. They allowed the
poll to be closed, voluntarily and perhaps designedly ;
and having thus declined further battle, it is in very poor
taste to boast now what great things they could have
done had they preferred fighting to " eating their leek."
The Mercury hints that it would have been very con-
siderate on the part of the authorities to have adjourned
the polling from Thursday evening until Saturday morn-
ing, because " he was confident that his observations,
published on Friday, would produce a marked difference
in the state of the poll on the following day." Modest
man! Cruelly ill-treated were the same " observations "
by the neglect or refusal of the authorities to accede to
the suggestion of their author ; and, as the natural result
of such cruelty, the wisdom of the Mercury was utterly
wasted, the poll being closed before its aristocratic read-
ers had time to " open their letters" or their shutters,
still less to be informed of the very unusual fact that
there was anything worth reading—anything likely to
work miracles—in its prosy columns ! Alas, poor Mer-
cury !—and twice alas for the public, whose " sluggish-
ness" and " apathy" and late rising occasioned so much
wit and painstaking to be thrown away !

to n,
Rushton,w as
s tesksge nltBlfho.r
of trial
bees'to
FROM A WAREHOUSE.—A tall elderly man,
STEALING
yreßhibrus.se, belonging to Messrs. Dover and
hwct hooseux.
Bath-street. The prisoner had got into the ware-
not employed there at the time, and 50Ib.
of the article were missed from a cask, the head of which
had been broken. The 181 b. was found upon him when
he was apprehended.
STEALING A WATCH.—A man named John Belcher
s, sessions, named
ei
fromß aWilliam
a though
warehouse,
was yesterday placed at the bar of the Police.court, on a
charge of stealing a watch. It appeared that a man
named Nailor, finding himself fatigued, and at some dis-
tance from home had gone to sleep in a hay-loft, at the
north end of the town. He saw the prisoner as he went.
On awaking he missed his watch from his pocket. The
prisoner was suspected and apprehended in a public-house
in Lime Kiln-lane. He acknowledged having pawned the
watch, which was traced. He was sent for trial at the
sessions.