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

TUESDAY MORNING, MARCH 31, 1846.

The debate upon the second reading of the Corn
Bill, continued during four nights, havt length
been brought to a conclusion, and Ministers have
succeeded, in this stage, in securing a majority of
eighty-eight. But although we have waded through
the discussion as patiently as we could, there is one
thing which we have not been able to make out from
the speeches of any of the Government supporters,
viz. :—the precise mode in which the repeal of the
protection upon native agriculture is to meet the
present crisis of distress, or permanently to improve
the condition of the Irish people. The failure of the
potato crop, real 'or alleged, and the probable fever
and destitution which would result in that country,
Sir Robert Peel informed the house, on Friday night,
were the urging causes of the introduction of his
present measure. True, he had previously been
preparing to veer round. • Last session, he said, he
had mysteriously hinted at the ultimate necessity of
astimilating the laws which regulate the trade in
corn to those which apply to other articles of food.
But it was the potato rot which concluded - the
matter. He might this very session have been utter-
ing as good protection speeches as any which he has
spoken since the commencement of his political
career. We would have been spared the necessity
of furbishing tin the cast-off arguments of Mr. Cob-
den and Mr. Bright ; but the murrain got amongst
the favourite food of the Irish people, and forthwith
the Minister applied
.vigourously to the study of
those League orations which he has since been
reiterating with such laudable perseverance, and with
as much apparent self-gratification as if they were
original productions of his own, and the cheers
which they elicited were the most cutting irony
which political tergiversation could earn for itself.

How does he make it out, we have still to dis-
cover,, that this measure is either calculated to meet
the crisis for which it has been framed, or perma-
nently to benefit Ireland ? Admit the potato dis-
ease. Give him the coming fever in ! Say that all
the "apprehended" evils set down in the elaborate
piece of scissors and paste work,; recently presented
to the House of Commons as a report, are really to
take place—what then ? These might be excellent
arguments for some temporary measures of relief—
a grant of money; the return of customs duties
upon imported food to be purchased by such grants,
and from private subscription, distributed amongst
the destitute peasantry; or the erection of fever hos-
pitals, accompanied with measures to prevent the
recurrence of such destitution, and to compel the
land of Ireland to bear the burthen of the support
of its destitute poor on occasions of such emergency
as the present; but that they are arguments in
favour of the repeal of the Corn Laws we must take
leave to deny. 1\ ay, we could even go further, and
prove that such a measure must have a direct tend-
ency to perpetuate destitution in Ireland, and to
introduce into that country a state of things which
is fraught with calamity and suffering to the ma-
jority of its population.
Four millions of the Irish population, employed
almost wholly in agricultural pursuits, have their
principal article of food destroyed, or placed beyond
the reach of their means to purchase. So it is
alleged ; and, for the sake of argument, we admit it
to be so. They have not the ability to procure that
coarsest kind of food to which we have habituated
them, although daily they are pouring their grain,
flour, pork, butter, and other agricultural products
into the British markets. And what are we doing
to enable them to buy that food to which they must
resort as a substitute for the coarsest food—potatoes ?
We are admitting at nominal duties, food, the pro-
duce of Foreign industry, to drive theirs out of the
market. We are annihilating the excess of the sale
price of Irish produce over rent and other outgoings,
which is. all upon which the poor cultivator has to
live ! We do indeed promise some temporary supply
of employment upon railways and public works, to
enable the population of Ireland to get over their
present strait. We have set up the Irish government
as a sort of cheap shop-keeper, to vend, at some 25
per cent. under cost price, the foods supplied by the
nation for Irish use. But all this has no more to do
with a repeal of the corn laws than it has to do with
the doctrine of traniubstantiation. Shew us that
the Irish farmer can better afford to pay rent and
employ labour, with the English market price of his
wheat and other produce reduced 25 per cent., and
we shall be satisfied that this measure is the cure for
Ireland's present and permanent social diseases.
The attempt to do so, however, has never been
made and never will be made. Whatever may be
the effect of free trade in foreign corn upon the
labourers, farmers, and middle classes in Great
Britain, to the same classes in Ireland it must be
utter ruin, inasmuch as if that effect is a cheaper
loaf—nominally cheaper, mind—it is at the same
time a destruction of the very market, whose profits
alone afford the means of buying, not a loaf but a
miserable meal of potatoes.
We must not be reminded of the fact that some
English and Scotch farmers are not afraid of being
able to meet and sustain the competition of the
foreigner. • We must not be told that the impetus
to be given to commerce will give increased pros-
perity to the Irish, as it may possibly give such
prosperity to the British farmer. Ireland has no
commerce—no home market for her agricultural
products. Above all, her social system and her
circumstances are totally different to those of the
parties who, Sir Robert Peel tells us vauntingly, are
ready to Welcome his measure as a boon. The East
Lothian or the Lincolnshire farmer, tilling each his
thousand or fifteen hundred acres, with abundant
capital and improved agricultural implements, can
he be compared in ability to produce cheaply with
the conatre or the rackrented tenant of a mud hovel
and a few badly cultivated acres of half-reclaimed
bog or forest in Ireland ? Surely not. It may be
Said, however, " improve your system of cultiva-
tion in Ireland; enlarge your farms; get men of
capital and science as your tenants—in a word,
resort to-the East Lothian or the Lincolnshire . sys-
tern of cultivation." Alas, as applied to Ireland,
this means only, " clear your lands of their present
struggling population; drag the thatch from the
roof : turn out thousands of wretched outcasts to
starve on the highways, and convert a whole country
into one vast pandemonium of famine, outrage, and
blood I" Are there any half-dozen of the smirking
gentlemen on the Ministerial or the Opposition
benches who tell us of improved modes of cultiva-
tion, impro ed machinery, scientific cultivation,
and other theoretic nostrums, as applicable to enable
British agriculture to sustain the competition with
other countries to be created_ by this measure, bold
enough to betake themselves in person to any county
in Ireland and try the experiment? Can they find
in three out of the four provinces of Ireland—not
unreclaimed bog or moor—any tract of country in
which fifteen hundred, a thousand, five hundred, or
even two hundred acres can be brought under the
cultivation of one tenant, without involving whole
families in misery and destitution, and perilling the
life of the hardy adventurer ? The notion is an
absolute absurdity; and Sir Robert Peel only evinced
his usual astuteness when he abstained from even.
the attempt to grapple fairly with the Irish part of
his case.

We are not afraid of being reminded that there
are patriotic (1) Irishmen—men of the O'Connell
and O'Brien stamp—who support this measure—
men who pr Tess to have at heart solely the good of
ther fellow countrymen. Such men, however, we
suspect, see in it the most powerful instrument by
which to bring about their ulterior object—the dis-
memberment of the empire. More than all, the con-
cessions which we have made to Irish agitation dur-
ing the past few years, the advantage reaped by that
country from the enjoyment of the markets of Great
Britain, have secured the continued allegiance to the
British crown of its excitable and misled popula-

. .
tion. Not the hypocritical appeals of its great de-
magogue—not the blustering activity of his liveried
flunkey—hut the progress of steam navigation be-
tween Ireland and the markets of Liverpool, London,
Bristol, and Glasgow, have been the " head pacifi-
cators." Destroy this powerful link of union be-
tween the two countries, involve the Saxon owner
and the Celtic cultivator of the soil in a struggle for
supremacy ; place Ireland in the position of the alien,
instead of that which she at present enjoys of being
favoured in the British markets over the alien, and
we shall find that the long-deferred period, for which
so many of her hot spirits are panting, will have ar-
rived, and we shall have to enter into a struggle, the
results of which cannot he contemplated without
sorrowful arid even fearful anticipations.

Our neighbours of the " Ancie t City" of C-hes=
ter, are troubled with an intermittent hallucination,
upon the subject of their being destined at 'some
nameless period to become once more a commercial
people, which appears to produce a most unhappy