The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1843-01-24 00:00:00

TUESDAY MORNING, JANUARY 24, 1843

We are not much given to sermonising; and yet we
shall on the present occasion transgress a little, and
take a text, which our readers will find in the Morning
Chronicle of Friday last. Here it is, nicely done into
verse by some League laureate :

" Peel, it is true, has given us foreign meat,
Which all the world declare they cannot eat.
We ask no turtle soup, or venison pasty ;
But—save us from his tariff's cheap and nasty'!
By corn and income tax, with heart of stone,
He taxes bread, and gives us skin and bone."

Upon these six most poetical lines we shall take the
liberty of indulging in a few remarks ; but, first,
might we crave of our brother journalist the name Of
the author or authoress ? We are confident that they
are not from the pen of any of our manufacturing
friends, from the occurrence, in them, of one expree"
sion—

" cheap and nasty !" No manufacturer of
" anything reticulated, having interstices between the
threads," and the said interstices filled up with devil's
dust, china clay, starch, sour flour, and the other
similar materials which have contributed to associate
the term in question—" cheap and nasty"—with the
products of the British loom in every market of the
world, could for shame avow the authorship of lines
containing such an allusion. The versifier must
therefore be some bard unknown; and we pray our
contemporary to allow us to hand his name—Timms
or Muggins perhaps—to an admiring posterity.
But to our text :

" Peel, it is true, has given us foreign meat,
Which all the world declare they cannot eat."
What a changed world it must be which cannot eat
" foreign meat !" Why we remember it handed
round, on nice little plates, by nice young gentlemen
of the Anti-Monopoly Association, at free-trade ga-
therings in Liverpool; and declared by quaker ladies
no bad judges of feeding—to be superb ! We rernelw
ber the eloquent George Thomson's description of it,
at Bolton—" fine, fresh, and tempting—fat and lean
beautifully mixed, Scc." We remember how friend
Ashworth craved for it ; how William Rathbone
ported it, and vouched for its excellence ; how Charles
Holland expatiated upon the quantities which his
house could supply us with, if permitted; and real;
really, have these eminent patriots aridliatribtessP
quakers and quakeresses, been all the time trying t°
put us out of love with the " roast beef of old Ea'
land," and beget a hankering in our minds for what
we " cannot cat" ? Shocking selfishness
But we forget ourselves. The " fine, fresh, and
tempting beef—fat and lean beautifully mixed"—Wo
not permitted to be imported at a reasonable dot)'
until the alteration of the tariff by Sir Robert peel-
No doubt, in pure spite of the right hon, baronet, the_
" fine, fresh, and tempting" commodity has all of
and
lean turned " cheap and nasty." The " fat ono
lean beautifully mixed" is now all skin and bone.
Free-trade gentlemen and ladies pray to be saved•froot
it. Their dental powers are not equal to the task !I
gnawing through pipes and sinews. It is salt, it Is
hard, it is unprofitable—in a word, it is " cheap and
,
nasty"! Need worse be said of it than is conveyed in
these magical words, which so forcibly remind us of
the rotten fabrics of their utterers ?
But stop, gentlemen and ladies. " Cheap and
nasty" as is this foreign meat, it is precisely the kin,
of stuff on which you would like to feed the workia
men of England. Friend Henry Ashworth, we hate
your autograph to prove the fact—your dictum, to the
effect that although such "highly-salted food" d°Bs
not at present suit the taste of Englishmen, yet 144
would become accustomed to it in time, as they aireav_4,
are to " salted herrings." You raved for this "cheap
and nasty food"—emacked your lips at it, to perstia;
us that it was fit for human beings to eat—paradedttu
cheapness as a grievance and told the world that, olive
free trade, every famishing mouth would be fed.
see now with what With this " cheap and nastyo
stuff; with this " skin and bone." Such food loft
or
perhaps take away the superabundant spirits of Vivo
poor spinners and weavers. From men, so fed' should hear nothing of physical-force Chartism. r
contented " skin-and-bone" drudges, they would w°rk
on without demur, no doubt, until they could work 0
longer; and then, pork-broth, and the other tell;
mercies of the union workhouse dietary, would do the
rest. You, therefore, gentlemen and ladies of the
t
Anti-Corn-law League, are not the people who
ar;
in decency at least, to rail against " cheap and
1195 t
foreign meat," " skin and bone," or whatever else yon
may call the commodity which
you meditated malti°
the sole food of a British working population !

In the character of leader of the opposition—'Self assumed, no doubt)—Lord John Russell has recel'di
.0g
issued a circular to his fellow "outs," beseeehl of
their early attendance in their places in the H°Lise
Commons, and informing them that " important lea'
sures would be brought before their notice at an earl
period of the session."

_---••.
What be these important measures which Lord - job°
is about, in such hot haste, to promulgate t° the
de,
world ? Is his lordship about to out-Cobden Cob
in his zeal for free trade ? Is he about to surpass' ie
°I, 00
sycophantic earnestness the crawling of the Ina 00
and Pechells to shelter under the shadow
League ? Is he about to set up the smooth and fo
0,0
sual faces of the " ministers of all denominati°°
as
and worshippers of the cotton-spinning Maronibio
the idols of his political worship, and the oracles °beat
is
political inspiration ? or is his lordship merely f
h
upon the indulgence of the reckless factiousness °f b,
character, and resolved upon a course of petty all heft
ance and opposition to the measures of Sir 11°0y?
Peel's government be those measures what they li/core
We know not; and, in good sooth, little do wed by
what may be the " important measures" meditatethat,
Lord John Russell. But we are quite satisfied ly to
at least, one important question ought in3rnediate uer
occupy the attention of Parliament; and as that
atioes
tion is one in which his lordship and his eollere be
are materially interested—as, in fact, it can no illo a trisl
conveniently discussed, in their absence, than woe
at the Old Bailey can take place without the Pr
the
of the prisoner at the bar—we rejoice sincerely Post
e
probability that his lordship's worthy ennlP
affoerS,ird 0
particularly interested,
veal may be induced to , be
their countenance at an early period. • h
0
bw more explicit as to the immediate question to