The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1844-01-09 00:00:00

TUESDAY MOHAING, JAN. g, 1844

From the proceedings of the law officers of the
Crown, and the traversers to the indictments for
conspiracy in Ireland, which will he found in ano-
ther column, it will be seen that the question as to
the legality of the repeal agitation is at length about
to be set at rest. The government is evidently in
earnest. The trials will commence on Monday next,

the day originally appointed ; and already, amidst the
blustering threats of the conspirators that an almost
indefinite procrastination of the result is within their
power, may be perceived the quailing of spirit with
which they look upon their position—may be heard
the initiatory howl which is to ring through the
length. and breadth of Ireland when the law shall
have told their doom.

Thus far, the leading ground of complaint by the
Radical organs is, that the Jaw officers of the Crown,
in exercising their right of striking off the twelve
names from the original panel of forty-eight, have
struck off nine or ten Roman Catholics and pre-
sumed Repealers. It would, indeed, have been a
marvel if they had not done so, remembering the
energetic efforts made by the Repeal Association to
swamp that panel with an influx of their own crea-
tures, and the open boasts indulged in that the
starving-out system was to be successfully applied
to the defeating of the ends of justice. But the
traversers themselves had the right, as well as the
Crown, of striking out twelve names ; and what was
their selection ? Was a Liberal Protestant or a
Roman Catholic amongst the twelve ? No ! The
parties objected to by them were exclusively Con-
servatives ; and, so far as the fact could he ascer-
tained, the most independent and resolute Conser-
vatives upon the list.
It may be objected, indeed, and no doubt much
will be attempted to be made of the circumstance,
that of the twenty-four names remaining on the
panel, and from which a jury must be struck, the
whole are Protestant; and, it may be, of Conserva-
tive principles. But what does this show beyond
the fact that the wealth and respectability of the city
of Dublin contains amid its ranks a proud predomi-
nance of loyalists and Protestants ? That such men
will not return "a true verdict according to the
evidence," upon these or any other trials, no candid
man can doubt for a moment.

'We return again to the subject, upon which we
remarked briefly in our last; viz. the depressed
condition of the working women of England : and
now, according to our promise, we propose to enter I
more fully into its details, and the course to be I
adopted for its alleviation. Its cure, alas, is beyond '
our hopes !
We have said already that to the intense selfish-
ness of our nature, and to the love of apparent
" cheapness," which a false political philosophy has
encouraged, is to be attributed the greater portion
of the sufferings, which the female workers of the
nation are doomed to undergo. Unhappily, there I
can be no refutation of the fact. The gradual ope-
ration of these causes, and the corresponding depre-
ciation of the condition of the poor throughout the
land, may be distinctly traced through the last five-
and-twenty years. Such depreciation has gone, '
step by step, with the growth of that system of reck-
less competition in trade, which our mania for cheap
—as distinguished from good—commodities has
originated. It has been aided by the influx of a
struggling population into our large towns, in which
the market for labour was already glutted ; and by
the disposition of our puffing traders to resort—and
indeed Eke necessity of their resorting—to those cen-
tral delaks of capital and surplus labour for their
supplies of cheap goods. Beyond this, and tempted
by the same cheapness, which abundant capital and
the command of over-abundant labour tend to pro-
duce, those traders are brought to embark in the
retailing of goods, quite opposed in their nature to
those which it is their legitimate occupation to vend.
Who hears, now, for instance, in our country towns,
of straw bonnet making, millinery, and other exclu-
sively female avocations, occupying profitably the
wives or the daughters of our working poor or mid-
dle classes ? The flash trader has a supply of all
these articles, direct from London or Manchester,
the production of the poor suffering Helots, who toil
in garrets or cellars for the pittance which a whole-
sale house permits them to earn ; and, by pursuing
the cutting system—viz. by selling articles at less
than cost price, to draw custom for other articles—
is enabled to undersell, and finally to ruin, the poor
sempstresses who depend upon a fair profit for their
bread. To what market go the thousands of dozens
of shirts, collars, &c., weekly made by the starving
females in the metropolis ? They deprive of the
means of life thousands of poor females throughout
the country t We heard last week of one large con-
cern in Manchester—supported, in all probability,
by some bubble joint-stock bank—which produces
weekly a thousand dozen of ladies' caps. How
many dozen pair of hands does such a leviathan
producer render idle ? And for what ends is all this
misery created ? That a flash shop may puff its
little hour ; a capitalist add some hundreds to his
annual earnings, and that the giddy, the thought-
less—shall we not add the unfeeling ?—of both
sexes, may save a mere trifle in articles of usefulness
or finery, and be able to boast of imaginary " bar-
gains," whilst they pay an amount, more than equal
to their fancied saving, in the shape of a poor's
rate, to support the victims of their senseless