The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1844-12-31 00:00:00

the remembrance, whether for good or for evil, of
ourselves and of posterity.
As a nation, we entered upon the present year
with flattering prospects. Externally the position
of Great Britain had never been more imposing.
\\re were at peace with Europe. We had succeeded
in settling differences which, for a lengthened pe-
riod, had ernbarrlssed our relations with the United
States. We had wiped off the stigma, cast upon
our arms by recent disasters in the East; and added
a vast empire, hitherto rigidly closed against all
confidential intercourse with other nations, to our
Iti.--ndship and commerce. We have not merely
succeeded in maintaining that position By a firm
and yet conciliatory policy, we have, during the
past year, warded off a threatened rupture with
France, without a stain upon our own honour or
the honour of that country ; and are at this moment
more firmly allied with all that is great and good
amongst its fickle people, than at any period of our
past history. We have shewn to the world that,
by a course of highminded justice towards each
other, the Governments of Great Britain and of
France can afford to despise the querulous and
factious efforts which are resorted to by unprinci-
pled men, to bring them into antagonism, and,
thereby, to endanger the peace of Europe. With
America we remain in amity, with few elements
apparent, in that country, likely to disturb such
amity; and in the East we have succeeded, by a
wise forbearance in success, in consolidating our
relations with the Chinese, and in developing the
resources of that vast Indian empire which calls the
Queen of this realm its Sovereign.
Nor has the condition, or prospects, of the colo-
nies of Great Britain deteriorated during this year
of a Conservative administration. The least flou-
rishing of these—our West Indian sugar colonies—
are gradually recovering from the depression, cre-
ated by the scarcity of labour, arising from the
Emancipation Act ; and, by a wise and liberal di-
rection of the powers, given by Government to the
planters, to provide themselves with additional la-
bourers from other countries, whose surplus people
may be disposed to voluntary emigration, the an-
cient prosperity of these noble possessions, so long
the envy of the world, is, we trust, destined to be
restored. Our Canadian possessions no longer
present those appearances of a disposition to social
disorganisation and outbreak against the authority
of the mother country, which, a few years ago, dis-
turbed them ; and even our distant possessions at
the Antipodes, in which so many of our industrious
fellow-countrymen have seen their, at first too bril-
liant, anticipations disappointed, are recovering
from the effects of past mismanagement of their
finances, and, by the persevering energy of their
British settlers, are becoming gradually more pros-
perous in their internal condition, and more valua-
ble, as markets and contributors of valuable pro-
ducts, to the British empire.
On account of our external position, therefore,
there is nothing for which we have to charge with
blame the year which is now passing, whilst there is
much which we must set down to its credit. Turn
we then to an examination of our internal position.

We need scarcely point to the increased prosper-
ity, which we have experienced during this year, in
every department of trade and of industry—we
need scarcely point to the improved financial posi-
tion of the nation—to spew that, internally, we
have vastly progressed. Our agricultural position
and prospects, too, are, we believe, at this moment
placed upon as sound a basis as at any previous
period of our history. The mutual relations of
landlord and tenant, and the connection between
the prosperity of the latter and the permanent inter-
ests of the former have become better understood
and more extensively recognised. New and more
scientific modes of culture are becoming extensively
adopted, the owner and tiller of the soil lending
their mutual aid ; and promise, at no distant period,
to render the people of the country dependant upon
the resources of their own lands, alone, for an am-
ple supply of the great staples of human food. A
material fact, bearing upon our agricultural position,
we may here notice incidentally, as having strikingly
developed itself during this year. At the present
moment three hundred sail of British vessels are
reported to be loading, at one distant island, with
fertilizing materials for our soil, thus affording prac-
tical proof of the intimate relation between the pros-
perity and increased enterprise of the agricultural
community, and the prosperity of the British mer-
chant, shipowner, seaman, and artizan.
We are compelled, however, to notice a few dark
shades in the picture of our social position. The
capital of the merchant, the manufacturer, and the
agriculturist may be more productive at present than
a short while ago; but, alas, we have not to congra-
tulate ourselves upon any improved condition of the
masses whose labour contributes, with other causes, to
that result. A temporary increase in wages may have
here and there taken place ; but, confessedly, that
increase is only temporary in duration and limited
! to a few excessively stimulated branches of industry.
Amidst the glitter of our prosperity—side by side
•
of ghastly suffering and privation, well calculated
to startle us with a sense of the insecurity of the
wealth flowing in upon us, and the insufficiency of
the mere growth of such wealth in a nation to in-
crease the happiness of its people, or even to remove
the pressure of want from their doors. Need we
look further for the evidence of this sad fact than
into our own streets and public institutions ? Or,
for its evidence, so far as the nation is concerned,
need we look further than to the growth and—alas !
under a Conservative administration !—the increased
stringency of that accursed system which is fast
winding its chain of tyranny and degradation around
the poor of our land ? We need not; it is thus
virtually acknowledged by our rulers themselves ;
and we defy the most sanguine of the admirers of
our existing prosperity—the most sanguine prophets
of its continuance —to assure us that, unaided by
other remedial circumstances, of which we see at
present littletprospect, it will remove, permanently,
even a fractional portion of that social disorganiza-
tion which we now witness and deplore. But, to
expatiate further upon this subject is beyond our
present task.
We proceed, then, to another inquiry, viz. what
has the past year effected towards promoting the se-
curity of the Protestant institutions of our country.
The answer must again be unsatisfactory. We have
been compelled to witness the further spread of a
schism in our Established Church, and a movement
of a large portion of its members towards the adop- ,
tion of the forms and the doctrines of Rornanism ;
and, further, we have been compelled to see this
movement not only unrepressed by the heads of our
Church, but encouraged by some of the most in-
fluential of those heads. We have been compelled
to witness these things as the spontaneous acts of
Churchmen themselves; but still more disastrous,
in its tendency, has been the policy of the govern-
ment, in matters affecting the institutions and the
established religion of the nation. We have seen
that government, with the consent of Parliament,
embark afr sh in that fatal course of concession to
popery and infidelity, the adoption of which by Con-
servative ministers in 1829, exiled their party from
power for a period of more than ten years, and ele •
vated to the seats of government a faction whose
" heavy blows and great discouragements," dealt
against the Constitution and the Church of their
country, have been so fearfully and so fatally felt.
The national mind, too, has we fear been prepared
for further similar concessions ; and we are proba-
bly doomed in the year which is corning to see the
power of the present government, and the influence
which it has acquired from the temporal prosperity
which it has brought to the nation, employed to
weaken the bulwarks of its strength, which are the
Protestantism of its institutions and its people.
On these grounds, then, we are dissatisfied with
the year which is hurryingito its close. We trust
that in our anticipations of evil to come we may be
mistaken; and that nothing but happy results from
the events of this year may be in store for England.
But when we witne s the apathy of those, to whose
voice it is given to direct the course of government
towards a safe haven—when we see Conservatives
hugging themselves in their worldly prosperity, and
worshipping the man who, whilst satisfying their
greed of gold, is aiming at the subversion of thier
dearest liberties and the wreck of their most che-
rished institutions—a misgiving will creep over our
minds that the glittering prosperity of this parting
year is not destined to be all for good—that, like the
enervating winter quarters of the soldiers of Hanni-
bal, it may only be the prelude to defeat and loss
disastrous as theirs, by inducing a blind confidence
in the statesmen who are pampering our senses by
throwing treasure and luxury into our laps, whilst
they are preparing to lead us to the destruction of
what we ought to hold far more dear and of more
lasting value than mere gleams of worldly sun-
shine, the fruit of revised tariffs or skilful finance.
We repeat that we may be in error in these fore-