The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1844-07-30 00:00:00

liberties of this land shall not be played away, like
worthless counters in a game of political hazard ?
Surely a statesman of this caste may be found; and
we would warn the selfish portion of the Conserva-
tive majority in Parliament that in such a struggle
it will not be safe for them to hang back. No
threats of resignation, no tempting and plausible
" arrangements" can be permitted to influence the
result of this question ; for we are firmly convinced
of the fact, and we would have the landowners of
England convinced, that the destruction of the Pro-
testant Church in Ireland, (which is the certain issue,
if it is not also the aim of Sir Robert Peel's pro-
posed policy of next session,) once conceded, it will
be too late to resist the tide of innovation which
they will have let in, and which must inevitably in-
volve every British institution in one common ruin.
Grant to the minister the privilege of dealing with
the property of the Church in Ireland, and we tell
the country gentlemen of England that the secu-
rity of their rent rolls will not be worth a rush.
The same pliancy of principle which has yielded up
the former, will have little difficulty in dealing with
the latter.

But, in such a crisis as that, with which we are
now threatened, we feel that mere appeal to the pa-
triotism, or the fears, of the Conservative majority in
Parliament is not sufficient. We must see the Pro-
testant spirit of the entire nation arouhed. We
must see the leaders of public opinion at their
posts ; their coldness and inactivity exchanged for
the same zeal and watchfulness which prostrated an
anti-national ministry, and enabled the present Con-
servative (?) government to abuse our confidence
and betray their trust. If the impending tide of
destruction is to be stayed, we must have no more
coquetting with the destroyer ; but, on the contrary,
a resolved and firm stand, by a united Conserva-
tive and Protestant people, on behalf of those noble
institutions which, are now sought to be trea-
cherously abandoned, by false friends, to the tender
mercies of exulting enemies. Half-and-half loyalty
will not do for this struggle. The men who engage
in it must be those who are not afraid to wear their
colours upon their breasts, and to hold by their
principles, to the death.

A singular diver-ity of motive for the adoption of
the same line of policy is displayed in the remarks
of the Morning Herald (ministerial organ) and of
the Times (anti-ministerial, and something else) last
night, on the subject of the Irish "Party Proces-
sions Act." The former remarks—

" Every person not of that numerous class who have
every thing to gain and nothing to lose by public calamity,
must coincide in the eulogium passed by the Duke of
Wellington on the Irish Protestants in the debate on the
renewal of the Party Processions Act. The patriotism
which endures silently and unostentatiously for the good
of the commonwealth, is as far above the enthusiasm
which only lives in brawling excitement, as any two hu-
man qualities can differ. The Protestants of Ireland are
naturally and by education a strong-minded people. It
is on this account that we are encouraged to dissent from
the apprehension expressed in the debate by the Earl of
Roden. if the Irish Protestants were like the materiel
of repeal meetings, an unreasoning mob, whose causeless
enthusiasm, in the words of Lord Brougham, it is absurd
to call public attention, we might, then, speak of their
considering a necessary enactment a gratuitous insult.
As it is, we must hope that they will see that the Party
Processions Act is continued, in pursuance of the wise
and successful policy of ministers, to enforce with firm-
ness and impartiality (without which all exercise of power
is in vain) such laws as they found in existence in enter-
ing upon office."

Complimentary enough, but scarcely just enough
in its reasonings. The Protestants of Ireland would
not, neither would Lord Roden, " consider a neces-
sary enactment a gratuitous insult." They would
not consider the " Party Processions Act" a gra-
tuitous insult, did the restrictions in that act bear
equally upon all parties. It does not do so how-
ever. Its very wording, that the processions to be
put down must assume a religious character, directs
it exclusively against the processions of Protestants;
whilst the supplementary requirement, that such
processions must be accompanied by " FIREARMS,
banners and bands of music," plainly takes away
from it any legitimate bearing upon the processions
of Protestants, or Orangemen of the present day.
Its re-enactment therefore, in its present form, in
this peaceable phase of Irish protestantism, is a de-
liberate levelling of penalties against men, mingling
in processions which can by any sketch of imagina-
tion be termed "religious," whilst mingling in others

(for instance, tee-total processions) because non-reli-
gious, (?) though containing the worst features ex-
cepted against,—the presence of "firearms, banners
and bands of music"—are left unvisited with legis-
lative censure.

But what follows is even more complimentary
still, and so just that it is strange and deplorable
that a Government, whose organ can speak in such
terms of any body of men, can yet pander so far to
the vile prejudices and passions of their enemies as
to visit them with the cold shoulder and the averted
face. Hear the Morning Herald—

" It i,,, indeed, very difficult in this country to appre-
ciate the value of that forbearance on the part of the Irish
Protestants of which the Duke of Wellington spoke. The
worse than Yankee bathos in which the English name
was denounced at repeal meetings, afforded, doubtless, a
great deal of entertainment to most of our readers. The
intrepid defiances of the executive by Mr. O'Connell
were, we dare say, infinitely amusing to those who re-
member the meekness with which that gentleman pleaded
Guilty to Attorney-General Blackburne'a indictment.
But the Irish Protestants who stood in the midst of these
self-declared enemies as the representatives of the de-
nounced race and the abhorred faith—almost the young-
est of them able to remember, each in his own neighbour-
hood, some active token of the hatred he was hearing ex-
pressed—could not afford to laugh.
" In the contingency of that appeal to arms which Mr.
O'Connell last autumn simulated to contemplate, and
which, we are convinced, every peasant who heard him
expected and desired, the Irish Protestants would have
been the first, as they were the nearest, enemy ; and had
that melancholy alternative been forced upon them, they
would have proved once more that the quarrel of Britain
was never led by a nobler " hope, miscalled forlorn." To
have remained quiet and watchful under such an appre-
hension, heightened by a daily torrent of the most men-
dacious abuse of their race and religion, was evidence of
an integrity of principle which is not to be shaken by any
absurd notion that by renewing the Processions Act, Go-
vernment can mean any insult, or that, indeed, their
rulers can have any feeling towards them but that of
gratitude."

The Protestants of Ireland might indeed be proud
of such flattering testimony to their loyalty and
good conduct, if it could, by any stretch of good-
nature, be supposed to mean anything. But, alas !
what can they feel, when they see this same minis-
terial apologist arguing that, because of that very
loyalty , new laws may be made, without insult, to
keep them loyal, whilst the professed and practised
law-breaker is to be left free to outrage order up to
the point when the existing uncertain law steps in,
at a vast cost to the country, to vindicate its powers?
The Times is more honest than this, but at the
same time more bitter, in the sneers in which he in-
dulges against the Protestantism of Ireland. The
Times argues that Protestants now have no ground
for complaint, whatever they may have had in pre-
vious periods :
" When Government was tamely looking on—was al-
lowing the great agitator to organize his troops, his po-
lice, his magistracy, his tax-gatherers—when the Repeal
machinery was daily increasing in extent and completeness,
and, without an apparent struggle of resistance, surround-
ing the Protestants of Ireland by a hostile and overwhelm-
ing power, ever ready, and every day more able, to spring
into activity and crush the paralyzed minority—then, in-
deed, that minority might with justice decounce laws
which allowed nothing to them, while they appeared to
permit everything in their adversaries—then, indeed, the
urgent law of sell-preservation might well suggest a com-
plaint that they were debarred from their hereditary prac-
tices, perhaps bad in principle—perhaps, in ordinary
times and under ordinary circumstances, threatening to
the tranquility of the country—but in the then stormy
aspect of affAirs, their only though imperfect means of de-
fence against the unbridled power and virulence of their
enemies.
" But this is not the present state of things. The Go-
vernment at last did more—tardily indeed, and after much
hesaatiou—much apparent effort at escape—much bad-