The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1848-08-29 00:00:00

TO CORRESPONDENTS.
We are unable tereply with confidence to the letter of "Inqui-
sitive."
Several articles and lettera have been again pooponed.
.

Or Kibtrpool g9tanbarb.

TUESDAY MORNING. AUG. 29, 1848.

THE budget of the most incapable of even Whig

Chancellors-of the Exchequer has been at lengL
laid before the House, at so late a period, indeed,
that it may be almost considered a posthumous
production. Sir Charles Wood has waited to col-
lect for the nation every scrap of financial comfort
which the chapter of accidents could possibly turn
up ; and the result is, nevertheless, a deficiency of
upwards of two millions sterling, to be made up by
increasing our debt, and saddling permanently upon
the country the additional amount of interest to be
paid. It is true that only a portion of this defi-
ciency is upon ordinary income and expenditure,
nearly two millions of it being for expenditure on
the CafFre war, and for the proposed loan to the
West India planters. We have no assurance, how-
-ever, of the continual recurrence of similar extra-
ordinary items of expenditure; there is little pre-
sent prospect of such an improvement in the con-
dition of the country as will afford us a margin of
ordinary revenue sufficient to cover such emergen-
cies; and the question with which we commenced
the session—flow are we to equalise our expendi-
ture and our revenue ?—remains still to be solved.
It is clear that we cannot continue to borrow as
we are now doing. It would be madness, even
could we assure ourselves that the necessity for our
having to do so was only temporary. We must
take the bull by the horns, and decide promptly
upon either retrenchment or an addition of taxa-
tion. There is the probability before us of an
early claim for money for the relief of Irish dis-
tress. We may also be drawn into a continental
struggle ; or, supposing that we are fortunate
enough to escape this evil, there is certainly little
chance of our being, for some while, in a position
to disarm, and thus effect any considerable saving
in the expense of either branch of the service.
Peddling reductions elsewhere will effect little. Our
first effort, therefore, must be by some modification
of our system of taxation, or some fresh impost, to
add to the amount of the ordinary revenue of the
country, which, it is tolerably clear, has been cut
down to too low a scale.
Who, then, are the party upon whom we shall
have to call to conduct this operation ? The Whig
party are obviously incompetent for the task. Their
past failures as financiers have been too signal to
allow us to entertain any hope from that quarter;
and there does not seem to be any other party at
present sufficiently strong to assume their places.
The Conservatives, following the ordinary tactics
of their astute leader, are "biding their time"—
waiting until their opponents are hopelessly run
aground, to come forward with some magnificent
project for their extrication. It may he found,
however, that the country has bad rather too much
,of this kind of strategy; that the game of setting
each other puzzles may be fun to the statesmen
who play it, but is death to those at whose expense
it is played. We cannot, as a community, afford
every two or three years to be driven into raging
fever, or wasted to tenuity, in order that this or
that rival state-doctor may be provided with a great
case to operate upon. This question of money—
this living beyond the nation's means—is the thing
of all others which must be dealt with at once; or
we may find ourselves some of these -days beyond
the skill of the great Tamworth physician himself.

A portion of the people of Liverpool petitioned
Parliament, the other day, that it would graciously
abandon its usual practice of bringing its sittings
to an end ; and the same cry of "esto perpetua,"
has just been repeated from Birmingham. Many
persons declined to concur in a request so exacting,
for two or three reasons to which we shall briefly
advert.

It is indecorous, say these petitioners, in grown-
up legislators, to be hurrying off to grouse and
partridges when there is legislative business of im-
portance remaining to be done. Why not let their
gamekeepers and the poachers have a season to
themselves, and give the country the benefit of their
own presence, during the winter, in Whitehall and
Downing-street ? The indecorum we admit. It is
shocking that honourable members should prefer a
day with JO2 Manton, amongst the heather and in
the bracing autumn, to a night with Joseph Hume
in the heated atmosphere of St. Stephens; or should
have the bad taste to think of powder and percus-
sion caps, whilst John Bright is ready primed and
loaded for an anti-church battue, and Chisholm
Anstey willing to talk them to sleep for any given
number of hours. 'The poet tells us truly, how-
ever, that

" Men are but children of a larger growth."
Our very pedagogues loved a holiday, as well as the
urchins whom they flogged through their acci-
dence. Members of Parliament arc made of flesh
and blood ; want exercise, at times, and change of
air ; and if they do manage to combine amusement
with their search of these, we can scarcely blame
them. Many of the truants, moreover, have busi-
ness of their own to attend to, which cannot be de-
legated so easily as the Brights of the house can
delegate theirs to a salesman in Manchester or a
broker in Liverpool. Some of them are lieutenants
of counties, sheriffs, and chairmen of quarter ses-
sions. Many have estates and mansions, which
attract their notice as well as the grouse and par-
tridges which are upon them, and have tenantry
besides, whose welfare and wants require to be at-
tended to. Before the dream of our advocates of
continuous legislation—all work and no play—can
be realized, we must alter the composition of Par-
liament. We must fill both houses with men of
the Cobden and Brot'nerton stamp—human clocks,
that go for ever without winding up—take constant
lodgings for them in a cheap neighbourhood, and
stipulate with them, on behalf of the public, after
the Squeers plan, for "No holidays, except at the
request of their friends."

We are ourselves rather anxious than otherwise
to get rid of Parliament just now. We are sick of
its endless debates, which lead to nothing ; its in-
competency for good, and its proneness to evil.
We are sick of the miserable exhibition made day
after day of an incapable Ministry, subsisting only
upon the charity of its opponents, or rather being
kept up, like a football, by the kicks which it re-
ceives. But most especially are we tired with the
sayings and doings of the rump at present left in
London to do the dirty work of party. In charity
and pity they should be sent home to wash out of
their brains the dust and cobwebs of a session in-
tolerable enough from its length and prosiness to
have qualified half of its members for finding com-
fort and comparatively rational enjoyment within
the walls of a lunatic asylum. Rebuke sensible
members for hurrying off to the moors, indeed !
Who would not be glad to get anywhere out of the
each of such a nuisance as they have been enduring
for the past nine months ? '

THE question, whether or not our dock and cor-
porate estates are to be made to contribute to the
support of our local burthens, will be brought
before a meeting of the ratepayers of the narish,
advertised to be held in the vestry of St. Nicholas'
Church, on Thursday next. A more important—
indeed a more vital—question, as affecting the
financial interests of all classes, was perhaps never
before mooted ; and we beg respectfully to urge
upon our townsmen the duty of being present on
the occasion, and of supporting the proposition
which will be brought forward by our respected
churchwardens.
There are, no doubt, many and plausible objec-
tions against the proposition in question. It is our
interest, as a community, to cheapen to the utmost
the dock accommodation of the port. We ought
to invite, by every temptation within our power to
offer, the resort of the commerce of the world to the
shores of the Mersey. This ever has been the
policy of the authorities of Liverpool; and we see
its result before us in the prmid position which we
hold as the first commercial port in the world.
But there is a limit beyond which such exertions,
and, so far as the parish of Liverpool is concerned,
such forbearance, cannot be carried. By the vast
extension which our commerce and our population
have sustained, that parish has been reduced to but
a
small speck upon the area which they cover; and
its inhabitants, now no longer the wealthy mer-
chants of the port, but the struggling shopkeepers,
the humble tradesmen, and the working classes, ,
can no Winger afford to sustain the overwhelming
amount of„the general' burthens of the locality
which is thrown upon them. These burthens must
be distributed ; and we can see no plan at once so
uat and so easily capable of being worked, as that