The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1844-02-13 00:00:00

We have long deplored—every humane man has
long deplored—the substitution, which has been
going on extensively for years past, of female for
male labour in factories. Sir James Graham
proposes—beneficently (.9 proposes—that no female
shall, under any circumstances, be permitted to
work for more than twelve hours continuously.
The young mother of an infant in the cradle, whose
unemployed husband is tending it at home, if he is
not at the beer-house or the dram-shop, shall not
be permitted to withdraw the maternal breast and
the maternal care, for more than twelve hours in
the day. Excteding humanity of a Conservative
government ! The mother, whose child is, or should
be, attending the factory school, must remain at her
toil until seven o'clock in summer and eight o'clock
in winter, and leave that child to the guiding of his
own inclinations, or of the vicious companions
whom he may meet in the streets. Bare philan-
throphy of a Christian legislature ! We trust that
English fathers and English mothers will not per-
mit, in this age, the recognition by parliament of
such an atrocity. The women of the manufacturing
districts must be dragged from this slavery. It is
revolting and barbarous.

If we must have women toiling in our factories,
give them, at least, some remission of that toil
which the constitution of man is alone fitted to
endure. Give, to the daughters of England and the
mothers of England, protection from the avarice
which would doom them to the body's and the
soul's ruin, to save a farthing in the cost of a bun-
dle of yarn or a piece of calico. Give them the
protection of that restriction of their hours of labour
which will alone tempt the greedy mill-owner to
take the husband and the father from their present
state of compulsory idleness, and restore the
daughter, the wife, and the mother to their
houses and their domestic purity and usefulness.
England requires this from Sir Robert Peel's Go-
vernment ; and to her repeatedly urged demands
the measure before us is an INSULT.

Now, indeed, is wanted amongst us the presence
of the factory people's friend—the lately-prisoned
Oastler ! Thank Heaven, his dungeon is unbarred
His voice, impressing upon the hearts of the British
people, already opened to the cause of their suffer-
ing working classes, the iniquities of the system of
our manufacturing districts, will seal the fate of
these iniquitous and mocking provisions of Sir
James Graham's measure.

The comments, in our last, upon Mr. Alderman
Evans' apppeal to the pubic in opposition to the
proposed plans of dock extension, appear to have
flurried that gentleman, if we may judge from the
tone of the reply, with which he has favoured
us in the Mercury of Friday last. We shall not
imitate him. Passion should never enter into the
discussion of such questions as the one which we
have now in hand; and whilst we propose het eto
examine the facts and figures put forward by Mr.
Evans, we shall deal with his ill temper in another
place.

In fairness to the Alderman, and to enable our
readers the better to understand the question at
issue, we give his letter entire.

DOCK EXTENSION.

To the MERCHANTS and TRADERS of LIVERPOOL.

It is neither my taste nor my necessity, in defence of
my statements as to dock accounts, to bandy scurrilities
with " editors" who assume, in the way of trade, the re-
sponsibility of articles which, from the knowledge they
evince of details, are, if not penned, probably prompted
by some member of the Dock Committee, an advocate of
those measures which I oppose.
The scurrilous epithets applied to my letter in the
Albion by a mercenary scribe, or his recondite prompter,
being the expected consequence of my advocacy of the
public interests, can give me no concern. The state-
ments which I have given of dock finances are, with one
exception, (a correction I felt justified in making.) based
upon the printed and written documents furnished to me
from the Dock-office. The correction consisted of sums
to the amount of about £14,000, which, after close inves-
tigation, appeared to me, and to another gentleman of
the committee particularly skilled in dock accounts, to
have been incorrectly placed to the debit of " New
Works," instead of being, as this should have been,
placed to the account of " Repairs, &c." For this trans-
fer I consider I have the virtual authority of the surveyor,
in his declaration to me that the lowest allowance that
shoild be made for " Repairs and Casualties" was
£35,000 per annum. This so far exceeds the sum
£25,828, stated in the dock accounts, under the head of
" Repairs." as to show the latter to be a manifest error.
A more extended classification, and a more accurate
distribution of disbursements under the respective heads,
is wanted for the purpose of ascertaining the real surplus
or deficit of dock revenue. If a sum is placed errone-
ously to the account of •` New Works," it does not enter
into the statement of annual expenditure, and so far im-
pairs the correctness of the statements, making the ba-
lance, or, in this instance, the surplus income, appear to
be larger than it truly is.
I will not again go into the details of my former state-
ments. They were drawn out with the intention of being
correct, and I believe they will be found, in any case, a
sufficient approximation to facts to support the general
tenor of all that I have urged in respect to the impro-
priety and danger of accomplishing the projected new
works.

We are told that only a portion of these new works is
to be constructed "at once," "some of them not at all."
1 know of no authority for this dictum, or this mode of
carrying out or partially evading the act which goes to
the full extent of the surveyor's project, and which act,
once got, may, and probably will, be forced by interested
parties into full operation.
The promise of not laying out the whole sum to be
raised is truly seductive, but it unfortunately happens that
the quantity of land to be purchased north and south will,
in limine, dispose of a large portion of the contemplated,
to be borrowed, capital.
The agreement with the Leeds canal will doubtless
make some small abatement of the estimates, but the spare
unmade land at the extreme north, which had escaped my
memory, may well be set off against remote future con-
tingencies.

I freely admit that the Albert Dock warehouses, when
permitted to be built, will produce a far greater return
than interest of money expended in their construction,
but for the Albert or other new docks no claim for addi-
tional revenue can be allowed, unless the trade of the port
increases to the extent of the work they do, otherwise new
docks will only take business from the older ones. In
this case, the expense of new as well as old docks will fall
upon an income which can be kept up only by very much
increased dock rates. But whether trade increases or not,
I am well assured that unless warehouses be constructed
to a considerable extent round the docks on this side, not
only new but old trade will fin 4 other domiciles than the
open docks of Liverpool:

EYRE EVANS.

In its main points, then, the Alderman adheres to
his statement of last week, in which he shewed a
deficit of £70,000 per annum, as the result of the
execution of the plans at present before the Dock
Committee, provided that the revenue of the Dock
Estate remains at its present amount. We must
see, therefore, by what kind of logic and arithmetic
he has arrived at that statement. Here arc his
original figures :
" The interest on £1,798,000, the present debt,
as it stands
Interest upon £475,000, to be still raised for
Albert Dock
Interest upon cost of land and proposed new
docks, £1,300,000
Lighthouse, telegraph, lifeboats, &C.
Management, police, dock-gatemen, &c., for the
old docks and Albert Dock
Lamps and miscellaneous expenses for existing
Docks and Albert Dock 12,893
Annual repairs and casualties on existing docks
and Albert Dock ...........•
Proportion of repairs, casualties, and other ex-
penses which accompany dock extension, on
proposed new docks .......... 39,000

18,904

44,796

£288,093

Deduct interest on Albert Dock ware-
houses .. £12,000
Balance of rents to be acquired from
yards, &c., north and south, less
£7,000 to be lost on Messrs. E. Chal-
loner and Duncan's yards
----- 14,000

£274,093

" If to this," he continues, " we add any expense which
may, however absurdly, be imposed for disposing of the
mud taken from the docks, we may, possibly, have an
annual outlay of somewhere about £290,000; from which
deduct the present revenue of X 216,000, and a deficit ap-
pears of above £70,000 per annum, which, unless trade
increases, must be provided for by increased dock-rates.
For the present we pass by the question whether