The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1850-06-11 00:00:00

background; the flippant and empty-headed spout-
ers of a nearly defunct agitation, and a tail.. cm",
posed of people of fixed incomes, placemeri, money
jobbers—the non-producers and drones of the social
hive ! It is British enterprise and industry,•froM
here to the Antipodes, against the rapidly de-
creasing faction in a few of our manufacturing
towns !
It would be a work of supererogation in :us to
attempt the expression of any critical opinion with
regard to the respective degree of merit and im-
portance to be attached to the various speeches de-
livered on this occasion. We might, indeed, re
mark upon the opening address of the noble chair-
man, Lord Wilton, as realising to its fullest extent
what Professor Butt so eloquently referred to as
" the mild dignity of a hereditary peerage rebuking
the purse-proud insolence of men who care not at
what national cost they may gratify their own reck-
less ambition ;" point to the convincing array of
facts given by Mr. G. F. Young, and the splendid
and clearly-argued orations of Professor Butt and
the Rev. Dr. M'Neile, or direct attention, not with-
out a feeling of local pride, to the able speeches de-
livered by the representatives of our own mercantile
interests, as showing that, amidst the busy whirl of
commerce, and the absorbing cares attendant upon
the vast transactions in which they are engaged,
the merchants and tradesmen of Liverpool have not
neglected the cultivation of intellect and mind. We
might also refer to the able and gentlemanly ad-
dress of Mr. Neilson, as a fine specimen of the
higher class of the tenant farmers of this immediate
locality. We shall not, however, dwell upon these
features of the meeting ; but refer briefly to the
indication, conveyed by the manner in which the
allusions to the subject by Mr. Samuel Holme and
Professor Butt were received by the meeting, that
the grinding injustice and tyranny of Sir Robert
Peel's cnrrency laws are beginning to be fully ap-
preciated by this great commercial community.
The studied mystery in which this question; vital
as it is to every commercial and industrial
interest, has been hitherto shrouded, is being rapidly
dissipated ; and the whole system of oppression and
chicanery, we warn the money jobbers and usurers—
the men who are fattening upon the profiit of the
enterprise of others—who are day by day being en-
riched, whilst they never toil an hour—shall lie
made so nlain and palpable, that he who runs may
read. Henceforth this question, and that of pro-
tection to British industry and capital, are one, and
indivisible.

ONE might almost imagine it to be the delibe-
rate purpose of the organs of the free trade party
to drive the industrial portion of their fellow
countrymen to frenzy, by the insulting levity with
which every complaint of suffering is responded to.
Does any particular interest represent itself to be
labouring under unusual depression—palpable
although that depression may be—painfully felt,
although those charlatans know it to be in many a
household, and throughout many a community—
such representation is met only by gibes of pre-
tended incredulity, mocking satire, or ribald abuse.
Are such complaints pressed home upon the self-
satisfied philosophers, and hacked with the facts
of actual and individual distress; the complainants
are forthwith deluged with a shower of figures,
adroitly culled from official tables ; designed to con-
vince the unhappy beings that they are in a most un-
informed state with respect to their own condition—
that they are prosperous, despite of their own con-
victions to the contrary—despite of the poverty
which they feel to be invading their own comfort-
able homes—despite of diminished profits, growing
cares and embarrassments, and of the abyss of
pauperism, towards which they see themselves, day
by day, being hurried. Thus, during the recent
debate on Mr. Buxton's motion, our West India
colonists, half beggared, although they know
themselves to be, with the evidence before, the
world of West India property, once yielding an
ample return, having been driven into the market
at from a twentieth to a fortieth of its cost, and a
large portion of it abandoned by its owners, and
left to revert to a tropical wilderness, were assured
by Mr. Economist 'Wilson, in his usual flippant
style, that they were totally mistaken as to their
position and prospects ; that, instead of being suf-
fering, they were rapidly progressing towards a
plethoric prosperity. All this was proved too—as
such things are proved now-a-days—by figures and
returns from blue books and consular correspon-
dence; aided by assertions sufficiently oracular in
style to convince any unfortunate suppliant for a
day's meal that he had the wealth of Crcesus, or
the bullion bags of Lord Overstone in his un-
furnished garret !
A striking example of this sort of comfort to a
suffering people is to be met with in the following
paragraph, perpetrated by the London Times on
Friday last :

" The returns of the Board of Trade for the month
ending the sth of May continue to indicate, in a most re-
markable degree, the general prosperity of the country.
The increase in the declared value of exportations as com-
pared with the corresponding, month of last year is
£1,398,232, of which £851,706 is irrespective of. cotton
manufactures and cotton yarn, and the inccreased price of
the staple in those markets. The even manner, in fact,
in which the augmentation is spread throughout the va-
rious branches of national industry will be found one of
the most striking features of the table."

Some of our local free-trade contemporaries point
to the same increased axports as overthrowing
completely all the arguments and facts adduced at
the splendid meeting held in this town on Thurs-
day last. How can you complain, gentlemen—
merchants of Liverpool, farmers of England,
shopkeepers, and labourers ? The exports have
increased nearly a million and a half during the
past month ! You must he doing well I You
must be prosperous ! What business have all you
shipwrights, artificers in wood and iron, bricklayers
and masons, coopers and porters, to be working
only three days a week ? What right have you,
merchants and tradesmen, to be complaining ?
How is it that your bills are badly paid ; that the
poor live in hovels fit for swine ; that tailors and
sempstresses starve for the miserable wages of the
slop shop ?—you must all be in affluence, for, see—
the exports last month increased a million and a
half ! We are going a-head. " The general
prosperity of the country" is undoubted !
We must really get rid of this miserable clap-
trap—of our dependence upon such specious
humbug as these tables, as evidence of the
" general prosperity" of the country. For what
does this increase of exports amount to, after all ?
Why, as matters stand, to a confession that we
have not been able to sell our goods for remune-
rating prices at home ; and have sent them abroad,
to markets already confessedly glutted, in the hope
of getting rid of them there—at some price. Our
philosopher of the Times takes care to tell us that
a large portion of this increase is " irrespective of
cotton manufactures and cotton yarn, and the in-
creased price of the staple in those markets." We
presume he lacked the power of face required to
assure the cotton manufacturers of this district
that they had been doing an unusually prosperous
business. If, however, he can point out to us any
other article of export, the manufacturer of which
is very prosperous, we shall he greatly obliged to
him for the information. Take, for example, the
article " Metals," the export of which we find has
increased in the month ending May sth £160,483
over the corresponding month last year, and those
of hardwares and cutlery and machinery, in both
of which there is a large increase—what is the
state of these trades ? In the iron trade, we find
from Aris's Birmingham Gazette that' forty Scotch
furnaces have been put out of blast ; several
Staffordshire furnaces the same. The makers of
rod iron, hoop and sheet iron, and other sorts, are
diminishing their produce; yet prices continue to
fall. And more pertinent than all, the same paper
reports that—

" The quantity of iron made is much in excess of the
daily consumption. The foreign markets appear to be
glutted with unsaleable supplies, and prices are resorted
to something under the actual cost in order to compete
with the tempting offers made by our more fortunately
circumstanced neighbours."

Who are these ? Why, those neighbours who
have still a consuming market. The Gazette
adds :

"But the continuance of business upon such terms can
only be a question of time ; and unless some unforeseen
source of demand should spring up, the whole make, not
only of this, but of each producing district throughout
the kingdom, must be further curtailed, and that within
a short period."

Yet it is upon a business like this, carried on,
admittedly, at a sacrifice, that the Times and other
similar philosophers congratulate themselves !
The real fact is, that an increase in the exports
of the country very frequently shows a state of
things quite the reverse of prosperous. The true
evidence of the prosperity of our export trade is
given in the returns of sales of merchants exporting
them, and in the remunerative result of the layer-