The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1843-01-24 00:00:00

justijied, on a former occasion,

2te whig govern-

honour and the safety of the cou
to the living and the dead. It i

due, above all, to
)mmerce, the er

consideration for the prostrate cc

feebled resources, and the financial decay of our vast
Indian empire.
We are told that the days of impeachment are gone
by, that a minister of the crown is no longer re-
sponsible to the judgment of Parliament for his errors
or his crimes ; but may stand up in his place in either
house, unabashed and unassailed by the hand of jus-
tice, though the ruin of an empire and the blood of
thousands of his fellow-countrymen be upon his guilty,
but imperturbable, front. It may be so. With our
excellent contemporary, the Morning Herald, we regret
the fact, if it be so. It may appear wise, in this re-
formed and liberal age, that for the crime which de-
luges an empire with blood, unnecessarily slain, the
punishment should be merely loss of office, or the
temporary displeasure of capricious constituencies;
whilst to the man who merely robs a hen-roost, or
kills and can ies off a sheep from our fields, the law

meets out the punishment of transportation beyond
the seas. The officer who loses a company by an ill-
advised or unskilful movement in the field, is subjected
to the judgment of a court-martial. The naval com-
mander who lowers his flag before an enemy, or even
loses his ship in a tempest, must submit to a similar
ordeal; and unless able to prove that all has been
done, which prudence and seamanship could do, to
avert the calamity, he must submit to censur

if not

to degradation from his rank. But the GOVERN Oh
GENERAL, who orders an army into defiles, at a dis-
tance of hundreds of miles from its supplies, in which
it is savagely and helplessly butchered,—the MINISTER
who thus perils the honor of his country and the lives
of his fellow-countrymen, are, in this excessively " li-
beral" age, to escape not only punishment, but even
trial; for IMPEACHMENT HAS BECOME OBSOLETE"!
Doubtless there may be wisdom in this; doubtless
there is liberality in it. We can discern the latter,
though we cannot the former. Our fathers, we sus-

pect, were wiser, in their generation, than we are in
ours—more jealous of their liberties—more jealous of
the humblest British subject who trailed a musket in
the cause of his country, than we of the safety of an
entire army, of its noblest and most distinguished
officers. Our fathers, we suspect, would not have con-
ceded what we have already conceded, even to a popu-
larly-elected House of Commons. They would not
have permitted the privilege of such a body to over
ride alike the sacred immunity of private character and
the law of the land. They would have considered
such a demand, on the part of any branch of the Legis-
lature, as TYRANNY, of the worst species and most

outrageous form; whilst such an attempt as is now
being made, under the plea of the obsoletism of impeach-
ment, would have created a storm of unappeasible in-
dignation from John O'Groat's to the Land's End.
We shall have no impeachment, then. The manli-
ness and fearlessness of the British senator, which
would, in days of old, have rushed upon such a course
—the spirit of fine and lofty chivalry which hovered
around the walls of St. Stephen's Chapel in the days
of Pitt, and Burke, and Chatham—is no more ! The
spirit which animated the bosom of a Hastings, and
which urged him to welcome, rather than shun, the
fiery torrent of eloquent denunciation, with which he
was assailed within those walls, exists not in the hearts
of the Palmerstons, the Aucklands, or the Hobhouses
Of modern days. Clubism, Liberalism, Utilitarianism,
and the new-fangled conventional resources of modern
society have, indeed, rendered the old-fashioned and
severe virtues and practices of our ancestors obsolete,
if not troublesome things. What was a vice in their
eyes is a peccadillo in ours. What was in their eyes
unworthy of a man or a statesman, is but blameable in
ours, in a Pickwickian sense. In fact--for we disdain
to palter with our feelings and convictions upon this
subject—the lofty, sterling, chivalrou • - -
honorable
character of

E. or Lngl,
whether displayed in her legislative111 U
assemblies, is
inhmen her
marts of trade, or in the intercourse of private life, is
no more that character which the world looked up to
in days gone by, than the Brummagem counterfeit is
the sterling gold which it is designed to represent.
Strange, by the bye, that we know so well the differ-
ence between the counterfeit and the real, in every
affair of life; and yet only decisively prefer the latter
to the former, when the object in which the quality is
displayed is a paltry coin!
But though we may have no impeachment, surely we
may have a searching inquiry; and surely some inde-
pendent member in the British Parliament will take
steps to bring it about.