The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1833-04-26 00:00:00

(FROM TILE MORNING POST.)

The innocent enthusiasts who expected blessings from
the reform bill are very naturally clamorous for the adop-
tion of some of the promised ulterior measures by which
the distresses of the people were to be relieved. The
people, they say, did not want reform as a dead letter,
but as an efficient instrument by which their condition
would be improved. They had no abstract horror of Old
Sarum, nor any romantic attachment to ten-pounders,
apart rom considerations of practical utility ; but they
loved and hated with a wise reference to results, and of
these they must not be disappointed. They want cheap
and good government, more trade and fewer taxes, and
all that perfection of social blessedness of which the whigs
said boroughmongering had deprived them, but which the
heaven-born bill could not fail to restore. If the people
procured reform for the whigs, the whigs were to procure
prosperity for the people; this was the understood con-
tract. Well, the people, having done their part, now ask
for the stipulated reward ; and bitter are the charges of
ingratitude and folly which the late friends of ministers
bring against them for not complying at once with such a
reasonable demand. Of all the journals which supported
the reform bill scarcely one is, by any accident, now pub-
lished which does not contain some merciless attack upon
the ministry for disappointing the general expectation, so
unusually evanescent has been their popularity.
Now, although we humbly trust that our disapprobation
and hatred of the present system are so intense as to be
incapable of increase, decrease, or end, and although we
live on the hope of seeing that system utterly consumed
by the breath of public indignation, yet we must admit
that even the Whig ministers may have hard measure by
being required to do what is beyond their power. It is
a sound principle in morals and in law that no man can
be asked to do what is to him an impossibility, and we
ate satisfied that it is not in the power of the present go-
vernment materially to relieve the distress of the people.
Ministers are to be blamed for getting into office upon
false pretences ; they are to be blamed for grievously in-
creasing the difficulties of the country by two years of
agitation on behalf of a bill destitute of a single useful
quality, and full of practical blunders; they are to be
blamed for robbing us of a balanced system of represen-
tation to which the country would have continued to look
up with confidence-but for their intrigues, and substitut-
ing one far less adapted than its predecessor to secure the
ends of good government; they are to blame for uni-
formly sacrificing the permanent interests of the country,
and even tht, integrity of the empire itself, to the tempo-
rary exigencies of their party ; for all these. and many
other things they may be blamed : but we cannot bring
ourselves to blame them for not relieving the public dis-
tress. .This, we say, is to them an impossibility, and
against suc,ll a charge their utter and proved incompetence
would be a complete defence.