The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1848-08-08 00:00:00

TO ADVERTISERS.

We beg respectfully to call the attention of
Merchants, Brokers, Auctioneers, and others,
to the important fact that the
LIVERPOOL STANDARD
IS NOW THE
ONLY NEWSPAPER
PUBLISHED WEEKLY ON TUESDAY,

which can be read on that day by the thousands
of Manufacturers and others attending
THE TUESDAY'S MARKET IN
MANCHESTER.
The STANDARD is taken at all the Newsrooms
and respectable Inns in that town and the
surrounding mane factoring district.
A SECOND EDITION is published at Half-past
Two, in time for the North Mails, containing the
MARKETS, and any news of importance that
may arrive in the course of the morning.

Eig W.ibtrpoot ginatibarb.

TUESDAY MORNING, AUG. 8, 1848.

WHATEVER may be the issue of the present
crisis, the question will still remain to be answered
—What are we to do with Ireland ? Whatever
statesmen may assume the helm of government—
and that the present men hold it only on sufferance
is tolerably perceptible—they will still have before
them an Irish difficulty, rendered even more intense
and intricate than at any former period by recent
events, and the social disorganization which they
must inevitably produce. Yet, if men in high
places would allow the results of our legislation for
the past ten years to pass in panoramic review be-
fore them, and would examine carefully the drift of
each separate measure which we have passed for
that country, we feel satisfied that a large portion
of that difficulty would vanish, and the vista of a
future full of prosperity and peace open before
their eyes.
We have been misled all along, it is clear, on
two most important points with respect to Ireland.
We have, in the first place, miscalculated very
greatly the Protestant strength of that country, and
set down a minority, instead of a majority, amongst
its Roman Catholic population, as inimical to con-
stitutional rule and opposed to industrial progress.
We can now no longer hesitate upon this point.
Loyalty has been proved to be greatly in the as-
cendant, both in moral power and numerically.
Unmistakeable evidence has been afforded within
the last few weeks, that, had the British govern-
ment adopted, years ago, a firm and decided atti-
tude ; had it not fondled with agitation, and placed
a bar upon loyalty; had it not depressed the Pro-
testant spirit of the land, while it exalted popery to
office and immunity; the Gordian knot of the dif-
ficulty, which successive governments have been
endeavouring to untie, could by this time have been
cut, and Ireland rendered the home of a happy and
a thriving people, a source of strength instead of a
reproach to a great empire.
We have, in the next place, mistaken as the voice
of that portion of the people who have approached
us with their petitions and complaints, the voice of
a class of men in Ireland who have, in reality, very
little sympathy with them. We have mistaken
the clamour of the mere professional agitator for
that of millions fermenting with discontent ; and,
as a natural consequence, the concessions which we
have from time to time made to such clamour, have
failed utterly to produce any valuable practical re-
sult, or to mitigate at all the real evils which, with-
out doubt, are rife throughout that unhappy coun-
try. With the exception of a defective system of
Poor-law—which is nevertheless better than none
—can we point out one measure which has either
had for its object, or tended, to raise the condition
of the industrious masses of Ireland ? We cannot.
We have endeavoured, by municipal and other
acts, to strengthen the hands of liberalism in the
cities and boroughs of Ireland. We have founded
"Normal Schools of Agitation "—and her munici-
pal bodies have well earned the name. We have
sought by a long course of truckling legislation to
-conciliate the priesthood of the Church of Rome in
Ireland ; but we have literally done nothing to
reach, or oven probe, the real source of Ireland's
sufferings—the penury of her small farmers and
her peasantry, and the absolute pauperism of a
large" portion of her people—or to put a stop to the
wretched and oppressive agrarian system, by which
they are crushed hopeless to the earth, or driven to
become the reckless instruments of the incendiary
and the midnight legislator. We have placed
power and privileges in the bands of the petty half-
employed professional men, tradesmen, and shop-
ocracy, who abound throughout Ireland and form
`the local cliques, through which the Romish priest-
hood work the machinery of encroachment upon
the Protestantism of Ireland, and by which they
hope, shred by shred, to strip away all communica-
tion with heretic England ; and the result is before
us in the continual turmoil, the ceaseless imitation
of
.the horseleech—the cry of "give, give "—which
has risen louder and louder at every fresh conces-
sion. We have legislated, in fact, throughout the
last twenty years as if we really believed that Ire-
land was the oppressed, insulted, aggrieved country
which she delights to call herself; as if all her po-
verty, her squalidness, the laziness, filthiness, and
improvidence of her population, the longing of her
peasantry for blood, and their delight in deeds of
wild revenge was of our creating ; and all these
deep-seated, deeply-dyed blots upon her character as
a civilized country could be wiped out by a sop
thrown to her agitators, or an additional source of
triumph over "England's weakness" afforded to her
truculent priesthood.

The time for ceasing to follow this miserably
mistaken course has surely now come. We have
treated Ireland as a spoiled and tetchy child too
long ; and we must now begin in earnest to govern
.her. But how ?—on what principle ?—it will be
asked. We answer at once—on the same principle
which we apply to any other portion of her Majesty's
doininions. At the present moment, Ireland is in
the attitude of a sullen rebel, prepared to break out
into open outrage against the laws, so soon as the
power which restrains her is withdrawn. She must
.be disarmed before that power can be withdrawn or
even weakened. She must be told that her griev-
ances, real or affected, will not be entertained at all
by the legislature, until she throws away everything
calculated to raise the impression that we concede
to fear what we should have denied to justice.
And, even when this is done, a very material dif-
ference must be made in our policy. It must, first,
bee of a practical nature. We must listen to the
teaching of facts before our own eyes, with respect
to the evils to be remedied, and the measures re-

quired to remedy them ; and not to the insidious
suggestions of priestly coteries, municipal corpo-
rations, demagogues, or c,rotchetty experimentalists.
Ireland stands in need of boons of a very different
character to the extension of political rights, and
other boons of a similar character, claimed in her
behalf, but not at her own instance. She wants
protection for her industry and encouragement to
her population to enter strenuously upon the task
of developing her hitherto only partially understood
resources. She wants the diffusion amongst that
population of capital, of practical skill and enter-
prise in agricultural, mining, and other operations.
She wants, in fact, those aids by which only a people
can ever become great and prosperous, who have,not
previously learnt habits of self-dependence ; and the
first step to place her in possession of those aids is
submission to the laws, and internal peace.
But the great truth which we must impress upon
the minds of Irishmen, by our future policy, is this
—that loyalty to the Sovereign and obedience to the
laws shall no longer operate against any portion of
our population, as a bar to the favourable notice of
the legislature, or of public opinion in this country.
We must no-longer see the favours of the British
Government, and the sympathies of any respectable
portion of the nation, lavished upon the unruly and
disaffected, whilst merit equal, if not superior, pines
in the shade, or is repulsed as intrusive. It has
been too much the habit of even the Conservative
portion of the British people to regard the Protes-
tants of Ireland as entertaining uncharitable opi-
nions towards their Roman Catholic brethren; as
disposed to cry " Wolf," when no wolf was near;
and they have been reprobated for preserving an
attitude of defence against the aggressions of Rome,
when the would-be wise and excessively "liberal"
amongst mankind conceived that the idea of such

aggression ought to be treated as an absurdity.
They have also been vilified for clinging to the me-
mory of that glorious Revolution, by which the
family of her present Majesty were seated on the
throne of these realms; and of banding themselves
together le ally for the maintenance of those prin-
ciples, and of their own religious liberties. We have
just seen sufficient to convince all reasonable men
that the Orange Protestants of Ireland have not
been warning us, for years past, of our danger
without sufficient warrant. Living in the midst of
a mass of disaffection, and mingling every day with
the myrmidons of Popery—taunted, pointed at,
threatened, cursed in muttered tones as they passed
to market, to fair, or to church each Sabbath day,
—these men felt, and felt keenly, that they were
safe only when united ; allowed to escape violence
only because when united they were strong. The
most bitter of their revilers will acknowledge that,
to the Orange Protestants of Ulster, and to the
spirit of loyalty, which they have succeeded in
keeping alive in the breasts of a large portion of
their fellow-countrymen, we are indebted for having
enabled the government, relying upon their aid and
that of the resident gentry and their well-affected
tenantry, to enter boldly upon the task of suppress-
ing a movement, which threatened to dismember
the empire, and to deluge Ireland in blood.