The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1848-05-16 00:00:00

TUESDAY 110RNING, MAY 16, 1848

A superficial observer, who had watched the
many changes which have occurred during the last
few weeks in the materiel of our Government, and
the positions of its various officers, would jump at
once to the conclusion that we are a marvellously
clever race—a people to whom legislatorial ability
comes by intuition, instead of having to be attained
by long and laborious experience. We have seen
noble lords and gentlemen drafted from office to
office, with a dexterity which a thimblerigger would
envy; the statesman who was yesterday immersed
in the details of the India Board, or in the manage-
ment of the buckhounds, equally immersed to day
in the business of the Board of Trade, whilst another,
to " make way" for him, is handed over to the
Board of Control, to the War-office, or to a seat at
the table of the Railway Commission ; and each,
apparently quite as much at home in his new duties
as if he had been apprenticed to them. There is a
change of names and titles at each shuffle of the
political pack ; a new distribution of salaries ; but
the official machinery appears to work just as usual,
neither to have sustained damage nor to be driven
at a greater speed. .
There is a growing feeling abroad, however,
amongst men who are accustomed to look below
the surface of things, which points to a very diffe-
rent conclusion, to be drawn from this apparent
universal aptitude of our legislators for every sort
of business. The public are asking the questions,
—what can be the value to the country of these
costly departments of the Government, which seem
to go on equally well whether a wise man or a
blockhead is at their nominal head ? How are they
constituted ? Whose are the real hands which pull
the wires ? These questions will, by and by, have
to be answered. We must know something more
of the actual working of these departments than
the mere fact that this or that ministerial suckling
is the ornamental Sir. Oracle, upon whom deputa-
tions have to wait, and who attends in his place in
parliament to answer questions, and to be sponsor
for the doings of the unknown conclave inside the
mysterious bureau. We must know whom we have
to trust and through what channel, poisoned or
pure, the small amount of information—the reports
and representations, statistical or otherwise, with
which from time to time we are furnished—has had
to pass before it reaches the public.
For years past, in some of these departments, the
existence of an imperium in imperio has been most
palpable. The seals of the Colonial Office have
passed from hand to hand, from Whig to Coserva-
tive, from the enemy to the staunch supporter of
colonial interests. Yet the policy of that office has
bad invariably an anti-colonial leaning. The few
measures devised for the promotion of the welfare
of the colonist have been cunningly crippled before
they were permitted to see the light, and more effec-
tually disabled afterwards by the same hostile influ-
ence. Can it be believed that the legislature
would have been only at this moment informed,
through the agency of a committee, of the ruinous
consequences of our policy towards our West
Indian fellow-countrymen,a if the business of our
ceneelionceAi once nact neen honestly conducted—if
the masses of evidence, accumulated and smothered
in the secret pigeon holes of that office, had been
fairly brought before its notice? Would we have
now to hesitate between the retracing of our steps,
from free trade to protection, or a grant of com-
pensation to the ruined planters, if the country
had been allowed to nonternplate the cost of its free
trade policy beforehand—if mawkish sentimentalists
and one-sided humanity mongers had not decreed
in their own hearts the ruin of these colonies, in-
stead of their regeneration ? We should not. For
years every fact, every missive from colonial autho-
rity, every representation from the public bodies
has had to filtrate through a poisoned channel,
before it has reached the ears of parliament and
the public; and the result has arrived. We open
our eyes at last when the vehicle, whose somnolent
influence has been carrying us along so comfortably,
has almost reached the bottom of the precipice.
We must turn to the Board of Trade, however,
for the most glaring instance of the injurious work-
ing of these public departments. For years we
have been looking to that Board for returns to
guide us—for the basis, the facts and the figures
upon which we have grounded our estimates of the
national prosperity or adversity, and the working
of our commercial policy; and most astutely that
Board has been advancing all the time the progress
of the known opinions, not of this or that minis-
ter who happened to be at its head, but of two or
three of its subordinate and working officials.
These gentlemen astounded us from time to time
with their tabular statements. Did any member of
either house presume to doubt the excellent results
of an anti-national commercial policy, he was set-
tled at once by a report or a blue book. Or were
we urged by a minister to go a little further in the
work of pulling down, he invariably came ready
armed with statistical proof that pulling down was,
in reality, building up. Tables of figures and facts
were prepared, at a few days notice, and some were
on band, ready cut and fashioned to prove any-
thing; and as much of it as he liked, provided its
tendency Was in the right direction. We have it
confessed by Mr. M`Gregor that the schedules of
the new Tariff Bill itself were drawn up in the
Board of Trade, Sir Robert Peel, their reputed
father, being only permitted to officiate, as physi-
cian, in bringing them into the world ; and up to
the present moment, surrounded though we are
with suffering directly traceable to that measure,
we have offered to us once a month official proof
thatitis succeeding to perfection !

We have had our eyes, however, at length opened
to the fact, as indeed we suspected long ago, that
in not one of these carefully compiled documents
can we, or ought we, to place the sligthcst confi-
dence; that they are garbled and one sided
throughout. We referred last week to the able ex-
posure made by Mr. G. F. Young of the very un-
fair return, printed periodically, and purporting to
give the imparts of foreign produce and manufac-
tures, in which, whilst such items as our import of
divi-divi are carefully furnished us, there is not a line
or figure to inform us of the amount of our imports
of foreign manufactured cottons, silks, woollens,
&c. Of course, it would not do to allow the gulled
and starving manufacturing operative to learn the
extent to which his labour was, day by day, being
supplanted by his foreign competitcr. It would
not do to tell him that the free trade lie had been
petitioning for meant only French gloves, French
lace, French silks, German linens and hosiery, and
luxuries cheap for the rich, and want of employ-
ment and poverty for himself. The gentlemen at
the board of trade knew that an honest and full
return would show the import of these articles to
be increasing; and that the remnant of protection
which was to have kept them back is utterly power-
less to effect that object. But such a full report,
we repeat, it was not desirable to furnish—for many
reasons. It might damage a few political reputa-
tions, whose owners, not haring quite finished their
work of destruction cannot as yet spare them.
We have still left a shipping interest to be de-
stroyed; and the day of its attempted destruction
is near at hand. A hostile committee has already
sat for the purpose of collecting evidence to justify
such an alteration of the Navigation laws as will