The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1832-12-07 00:00:00

ELECTION PLACARDS.

7.17 THE EDITOR OF THE LIVERPOOL ST4INDARD.
Siw,-I.have taken the trouble to peruse a few of those mise-
rable elfusious of the enenwwith which our walls are placarded,
awl I should infer from the contents that their cause is not a
very prosperous one; for they are already obliged to have re-
_ course to falsities, and tho.se most wretchedly fashioned into
-settiethinglike sense or meaning) indeed, as literary morceaux
. they aro .xuvaliiable. I shall not dwell on their literary merits,
:bat haaard a few,reatiarlcs on.the contents of one whieh.has.been
brought forth 'to-day to the admiring gaze of the-gifted few.

It appears to be the object of Messrs. Swart and Thornely
(I may safely join them together as they make .no secret of
their coalition) to persuade us that there are two great parties
in this town whose interests are distinct and separate, namely,
the merchants and the shopkeepers; the former, of course, corn-
prising all the colonial and shipping interests. Having now
drawn an imaginary line (the offspring of their own brain, by
the bye,) between these parties, without attempting to prove
that there is such a line, they go on to show. that Mr. Evart, is
the champion of the shopkeepers, and that the merchants have
brought their two Conservative candidates into the field in de-
cided-hostility to that body, to protect their own private interests
to the prejudice of all other. Now I would ask of these Wise
men in what
_particular the interest of the merchant and ,tite
shopkeeper differ? They cannot tell me; for their interests are
one and the same; so that their distinction is a palpable ab-
surdity, and must be acknowledged as such by every Juan -who
has the gift of common sense, and a moment's thought will
prove it to be merely "a weak invention of the enemy." I
would now ask, to whom is Liverpool indebted for her pros-
perity ? what are the sources of her wealth? how happens it
that the village of a century ago is now the second port in the
kingdom? I had almost said, and perhaps may say ere long,
the second port in the world. She owes it to the enterprising
and manly spirit of her merchants, and to the upright and loyal
character of her inhabitants. The moment she is deprived of
her commerce, that moment her riches will go from her, and
then what becomes of the honest and hard-working tradesman,
who has fought his way into a house of his own; a laouse which
he has perhaps bought at an enormous price, in consideration of
its being favourably placed in our greatest street? His shop is
empty, his property valueless, and his ruin is soon effected.
Ruin our colonies, so deeply involved with us ; ruin our ship-
ping, atready borne down by the weight of the opposition from
the other side of the Atlantic, you have then ruined your mer-
chants; the sources of our riches are dried up; for our com-
merce is gone. And whom do we drag with us in our fall?—all
those that depend upon us for support. And yet Messrs. Evart
and Co. will tell us that our interests are different, and that the
representative of the merchant is not the representative of the
people. Let that respectable body, the shopkeepers, consider
how closely both interests are linked together, and they will
soon see through the shallow artifice that has been employed to
separate us. They will soon see the motive, and believe, as I
firmly do myself, that the cause is bad in aid of which falsehood
is called instead of argument, and in which it is necessary to
bedaub our walls with false assertions and miserable sophistry.
I have written this hurriedly, and scarcely know whether it
is worthy of insertion : it can at least claim the merit of truth,
which is not considered worthy of the notice of our witty and
clever composers of trash in, pink and blue (borrowed plinries,
en passant).—Yours, &c.
Satarday, Dec. 1. VERITAS.

THE LIVERPOOL STANDARD.