The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1844-07-09 00:00:00

ADMITTED

In-patients
Out-patients
Casuals during the week 4
Remaining in the house, ig6

Consulting Surgeons, Alr. Forshaw and Mr. Dawson.
Chaplain... ...... Rev. Thos. Harries.
Apothecary, Mr. George Padley.
House Visiters, J. B. Brancker and C. Moss, Esqrs.
House Surgeon . Mr. M'Cheane.
JAMES BOLD, Treasurer.

NORTHERN HOSPITAL, JULY 6.
[WEEKLY REPORT.]
Accidents ....... I ......... 25 Cured
ADMITTED.
15
Medical and Surgical cases Relieved and at own request 2
DISCUAnclin.
Upon recommendation ... 10 Attending as Out Patients. 19
Irregular
36 Died 3
Remainingin the Hospital. . 72.

total.

Consulting Surgeon, William Gill, Esq.
House Visiterl, John Lightbody and H. J. Sanderson, Esq.

_
treasurer,-R. W. Bateson, Esq.
Chaplain, Rev. Win. Hughes.--House-Surgeon, Mr. Parker.

Etc Xiberpoot alanDarti.

TUESDAY 1110IZAING, JULY 9, 1844.

We appear certainly to be progressing, as rapidly
as we can progress, towards a state of things which
will scarcely leave us room to boast that we live un-
der a representative government, or enjoy the bene-
fits of a mixed constitution. But a week or two
ago we had to grieve over the spectacle of a House
of Commons (in the case of the factory bill and sugar
duties question) consenting to stultify itself and eat
its twice recorded opinions at the dictation of a
minister. Next, we had to witness the same process
performed by another branch of the legisl.ture—
the House of Lords, in the case of the bill of Lord
Cottenham;—but on that occasion we were left rather
more in the dark as to the inducing causes of the
ready changes of opinion displayed. We have now,
however, to behold the prerogative of the Crown
interposed to prevent the further progress of a mea-
sure in that House, which is distasteful to Govern-
ment, although prayed for by a large and influential
portion of the people. We refer, of course, to the
proceedings in the case of the bill of Earl Powis, for
preventing the amalgamation of the Sees of St.
Asaph and Bangor.
The circumstances of this last outrage upon the
constitution are of course familiar to our readers.
The House of Lords had affirmed the principles of
the bill of Earl Powis, in opposition to the wishes of
Ministers and their supporters. What, then, were the
next steps which an adherence to the spirit of the
constitution would have pointed out? The bill would
have gone down to the House of Commons, where,
if it had withstood the ordeal of further ministerial
opposition, the refusal of the royal assent might still
have been interposed to prevent its passing into a
law. But this was not the straightforward course
adopted. A discussion by the House of Commons
of the question involved in the bill might not have
been convenient,—might have elicited a decided ex-
pression of public opinion upon the principles which
it involved,—and accordingly a more crafty mode of
effecting the object of ministers was hit upon. It
was discovered—for the first time after the passing of
the second reading of the bill, and subsequently the
discovery was affirmed by a committee appointed to
search for precedents—that the rules of the house
required that, previous to its introduction, the royal
assent should have been obtained, on the ground
that it was a measure affecting (beneficially by the
way) the patronage of the crown ; and the house was
exultingly told by his Grace the Duke of Welling-
ton, that her Majesty would be advised to withhold
such assent. The proceedings up to the present
time are accordingly vitiated ; and the ministry are
saved from possible defeat upon a measure, against
which their minds are apparently set, by a point of
mere form, the resort to which we cannot but con-
ceive to he shabby and contemptible.
We lament certainly to see a government, com-
posed, as is the present government, of men who
have earned the respect of their fellow-countrymen,
descend to courses such as this—so calculated to
reduce the estimation in which we have hitherto
been accustomed to hold them ; but we regret such
courses the more, from the disposition—the con-
firmed disposition—which they evince, on the part of
Government, to outrage the spirit of the constitu-
tion, and to arrogate for the execdtive alone the au-
thority which ought to belong to the three branches
—Queen, Lords, and Commons—of which that con-
stitution is composed. We are satisfied that no
practice can be so fraught with evil and danger to
the solidity and permanence of the institutions of
our country as the exhibition of such a power wielded
by an executive, and of the tendency of those insti-
tutions, as at present regulated, to lead, in practice,
to such an utter infraction of their spirit : and we
much fear that ultimately it may lead to an up-
heaving of the currents of public feeling and their
direction towards remedial or quasi-remedial mea-
sures, to which the agitation of the Reform Bill was
but a feeble and trivial demonstration.
We cannot conclude these few remarks without
taking the opportunity of referring our readers to
an able letter in our columns of this day, under the
signature of " Cato," in which the whole subject of
Our legislative position, with its tendencies and evils,
upon which we have barely touched, are treated with
a depth of discernment and sound judgment which
must win for them the attention of all reflective men.
To ourselves the letter in question is additionally gra-
tifying, not only because we discern in it many views
which completely coincide with our own, but because,
from the rank and positiOn of the writer, we are as-
sured that the views in question are not only those
of distant' and humble spectators, but as well of men
forming a portion of those institutions awl orders,
whose prosperity and permanence we desire to main-
tain as the surest guarantee of the liberties of the
people.

We are again in a position to congratulate our
readers upon the continued improvement of the na-
tional revenue in all those branches whose condition
is usually considered to bear upon the prosperity of
the country. The quarterly return of the revenue
which is now before us, and of which an abstract will
be found in another column, exhibits an increase
for the quarter ending July 5, 1844, over the cor-
responding quarter of last year, under the heads of
customs, excise, stamps, and taxes, of £448,574,
of which £312,029 are derived from the customs
alone. Upon the year ending sth July, 1844, we
find under the same four heads an increase, over the
corresponding period of last year, of £1,334,502, of
which £835,349 is the produce of customs, and
£420,073 of excise. The total nett increase of the
year amounts to no less than £2,440,436.
Of this large amount, the sum of £1,929,666
is the increase under the head of property tax,
reduced, however, by a decrease under the head
of Miscellaneous, which is accounted for by a
greater amount of the Chinese ransom having come
into the accounts last year than during the present.
But for this deficiency of extraneous income, the
total increase of the year would have been somewhere
about Three Millions.

Upon the whole, therefore, it must be admitted
that the position of the country, as exhibited by this
return, is highly flattering, although we are far from
saying that it is one of permanent prosperity, or
which will warrant us in expecting the removal of
the Income Tax at so early a period as we may have
hoped for. The elasticity of our commerce and in-
dustry, however, as is shown in the fact of our Cus-
toms having already recovered from the effect of the
reduction of duties which took place under the new
tariff, is abundantly proved; and with the gradual
improvement which is going on from quarter to
quarter in those branches of the revenue, upon
which alone a nation ought legitimately to depend,
we may still, and with confidence, look forward to
an early release from the necessity of resorting to
any extraneous and unnatural supports of the na-
•tional credit.

ith re-
We perfectly agree with the _Mercury, w
epee to the igportance of a proper selection be-
ing made of a person to fill the office of " Supern-
tendent of the Parochial Industrial Schools," about
to be opened in this parish; and we are prepared to
approach the consideration of the question, im-
tressed with a sense of that importance, and in a

spirit of candid and single-minded earnestness. H e
should indeed he no ordinary man—he should indeed
be chosen from other than mere party considera-
tions—to whom is committed the task of superin-
tending the education and training, in habits of
industry, of some eighteen hundred of the most de-
solate and neglected of our species, the children of
our unfortunate poor. The moral responsibilities
of such a man will indeed be great ; and propor-
tionately so will be his reward, in the satisfaction
with which he will look back upon his work in after
years, if, by the blessing of God, he succeed in
moulding the mass of ignorance, idleness, and early
vice, committed to his charge, into one of industrious,
right-minded, Christian men and women. •
But, alas, a Herculean and, we fear, a hopeless
task is this for any man to undertake ! The very
magnitude of the charge imposed would defeat its
efficient fulfilment. It is preposterous to imagine
that any superintendent, however talented, however
indefatigable, could do more than barely see, and
that but imperfectly, that his subordinates, who
must necessarily be very numerous, in an establish-
ment containing eighteen hundred children of the
worst class, were doing their duty; were even coldly
and mechanically going through their ordinary rou-
tine tasks. To render educational superintendence
worthy of the name—to enable such superin-
tendence to attain any practically beneficial results
—the master should have opportunities of watch-
ing closely the temper, not only of every child under
his care, but of every teacher ; of becoming familiar
with the character and capabilities of each ; of
winning the confidence, the respect, the love, of
each. No cold abstract of morality, or even of ex-
cellence the most perfect, merely exhibiting his vir-
tues or amenities afar qf, could accomplish any ma-
terial portion of these requirements.
By way of practical illustration of our meaning,
let us suppose that of this eighteen hundred chil-
dren, each hundred are placed under the care of a
•
trained teacher, who is assumed to be competent to
the proper performance of his duties.. Eight hours
per day may perhaps be taken as the period allotted
for school hours. 'Supposing, then, this eight hours
uninterruptedly devoted by the superintendent to
the duty of visiting, he can at the utmost devote
twenty-seven minutes per day to each teacher. But
no hundred boys or girls can be efficiently taught
in one class. Say then that twenty-five is the limit
of the classes, and it will be only once in four days
that each class can be visited, for twenty-seven ,
minutes each. Surely there are not presented here i
those opportunities of exercising, on the part of a
superintendent, that " knowledge of the human
character and of the world" spoken of by our con•
temporary, or of " infusing by precept and example
high moral sentiments and moral purposes into the
minds of his young charge !" The idea is palpably
vain that any amount of success, at all approaching
that calculated up on by the Mercury, can be
achieved.

We contend, then, that the utmost that can be
expected from the superintendent of a school, so
injuriously large as is this experimental industrial
school, with its eighteen hundred children, must be
the preservation of an efficient and watchful control
over the various teachers and sub-teachers or moni-
tors ; an attentive care that the routine o' the sys-
tern adopted is faithfully carried out, and that order
and industry are made to prevail : and here even is
a vast and important respinsibility. There is much
in the character and temper of those who form the
channels by which instruction is communicated,
which influences its effect upon the recipients ; and
it is therefore perhaps more important that the
teachers, to whom the children are most imme-
diately committed, should be scrutinised with a ju-
dicious eye, than that a superintendent should strain
at the performance of further duties, to which he is
manifestly incompetent.
Admitting then, most fully, the importance of a
judicious selection being made for this office of su-
perintendent, we come to the question—what fur-
ther steps are necessary to effect the full realisation
of what we must conclude to be the views of the au-
thorities—viz., the education and training of these
poor children in habits of Christian and social use-
fulness. And here we must submit that no mere
effort to instil and " exemplify, by thousands of
proofs, the great truths"—rather say the cold, ab-
stract, lifeless truths—" that honesty is the best
policy,' and that occupation is pleasure,'" will
ever bring about, or has ever brought about, the
consummation aimed at ; will ever even insure that
" not one in twenty of all the children" so taught
" should be heard of in future years as connected
with pauperism or crime." Such a system, we are
confident, is not that to which Dr. Kay looks for
success, and to which the parochial authorities of
Liverpool will ever give their sanction. Of a sys-
tem calculated to be of real usefulness to those to
whom it is afforded, the inculcation of vital religion,
and not mere worldly advantage—that " honesty"
is required from them by their Maker, not merely
that it is their " best policy"—must be the founda-
tion; and it is to the instruments to be provided, as
necessary above all things for forming the substra-
tum of the character of an estimable and valuable
member of society in all its grades, that we look
with infinitely more anxiety than to the appointment
of a mere superintendent of the general manage-
ment of the schools. Such proper instruments,
who we contend should be Ministers of the Esta-
blished Church, may already be within the contem-
plation of the authorities and of the Poor Law
Commissioners. The tone of our contemporary,
however, would almost lead us to the suspicion that
they are not; that religious teaching is to be admi-
nistered, cut down into abstract and worldly maxims
of expediency, by the same hands which administer
mere secular knowledge ; and if so lamentable an
error he committed in the details of this already ill-
contrived and extravagant scheme, it needs no fore-
sight to be able to predict that it will result in utter
and irredeemable failure.

Mr. Alderman Evans, we proved long ago in the
columns of the STANDARD, to be a master of
figures ; in other words he can throw them into as
many different combinations as the Wizard of the
North, or the Wizard of the Portico, can create in
a pack of cards. But we were not aware, until the
expose in the Dock Committee's meeting of Thurs-
day last, that he could, in the presence of counsel,
witnesses, accountants, and members of a commit-
tee of Parliament, convert a plus into a minus quan-
tity, and make a credit balance of seventy or eighty
thousand pounds assume the appearance of a debit
balance, or deficiency, of some fifty odd thousands.
Yet such a feat, it would appear, the "enthusiastic"
alderman performed before the committee upon the
Liverpool Docks' Bill ; and for the sake of Cocker,
Walkinghame, and the science of arithmetic, we
regret that, on account of the expense with which it
would be attended, we are not to be indulged with
a printed copy of the evidence from which to en-
lighten ourselves, the public, and the Dock Bond-
holders in especial, upon the mode of ratiocination,
or conjuration, by which a positive was on this oc-
casion converted into a negative quantity, and the
security of their dividends made to assume so
shadowy an appearance.
There is a hope in store for us however. There
is a safety valve in existence which will at once pre-