The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1843-07-11 00:00:00

THE LIVERPOOL STANDARD

that injustice, if perpetrated at all, has been perpe-
trated upon the public at large—upon the dock-rate
payers ; and that such injustice consists in the fact
that power has been given to the dock trustees—or,
rather, as we have before stated, to the " Committee
f worts"—to lar;-'
"'°'l the funds of the estate in the
erection of buildingS, of which they od not even
seem to know' the cost; 'and against which nine out
of ten in the coirtirMnity are already exclaiming as
most i`..tjudicionsiy planned, and likely to be almost
rui'.tously inoperative. Before listening to any
prayer, either of the Council, the Dock Committee,
the warehouse owners, or :he party "o-t of doors"
who are agitating this question,—before giving to
the Dock Committee those increased powers which
two sessions ago they refused,—Parliament might
be disposed to inquire into the mode in which the
existing powers of that body had been used; and
would undoubtedly receive, as no light evidence of
its injurious nature, the declaration of the mercan-
tile associations to which we last week referred.
But we p oceed with Mr. Evans's remarks :

" He (Mr. E.) should be very loth to be the person to
accompany any eminent stranger to look at the Albert
Dock, when completed under the present restriction, and
to tell him, when he asked the reason of the desolation
of half the ground. that, though allowed to build the
foundations and vaults, they were not allowed to build
the warehouses. (Hear, hear.)"

So should we be loth to be the persons to accom-
pany any stranger, illustrious or otherwise, to look
at erections, and foundations of erections, and to
have to tell him that already it was a subject of
public debate whether those erections would have
to be moved back, and those foundations, completed
at an enormous expense, be rendered wholly use-
less !

" He should blush to tell the stranger that Liverpool
was under the control of a private interest that oppressed
her commerce and her trade ; that, whilst every one of
these men was at perfect liberty to build any kind of
trashy warehouses he liked, on hill or dale, or wherever
he would, the public were inhibited from building the
best of warehouses on the most eligible site. (Hear, hear.)
Men must be under the most degrading influence in the
world, to suppose that the commerce of Liverpool was to
be checked, interrupted, and curtailed by a few men,
whose interests were, after all, comparatively unimpor-
tant ; and there could be no doubt that the corporation
ought to be released from such a degrading position as
this. The memorial alluded to a new circumstance—the
vast number of warehouses that had been burnt. When
these were to be replaced, would they deny the public the
application of the principle which they had already con-
ceded, by allowing half of the proposed dock warehouses
to be erected ? He did believe that if the warehouse in-
terest had effected the conquest of Liverpool just as an-
other William the Conqueror might have done, they could
hardly have imposed more destructive and more degrading
conditions on the town than they did by the late Dock
Act. He did hope that, under all the circumstances,
and considering the evident want of warehouses, the
warehouse interest would withdraw their opposition, and
allow warehouses to be built, which would be a model to
the world."
We, too, should blush ; but it would be to be
found talking such empty trash as this, and to be
so palpably displaying to the world how totally our
judgment and common sense we e obscured by the
abs Orbing influence of a pet crotchet !
Mr. Alderman Evans must know, or he ought to
know, that any application to Parliament to permit
the engrafting of a clause, so vitally important and
so extensive in its operation as the clause proposed
to be engrafted upon the Fire Prevention Bill, could
only tend to prevent the passing of that bill itself.
We have the distinct declaration of the Town Clerk
that such would be the effect of the application in
question; and really, when we see a gentleman, in
defiance of such an opinion, persevere in an obsti-
nate attempt to hurry the Council to the adoption
of a course so suicidal, we may almost be justified
in the suspicion that he cares less for the Fire Pre-
vention Bill—less for the providing of a remedy
which will contribute to arrest the frequent confla-
grations occurring in the town—than for the tri-
umph, by the aid of a temporary ferment in the
public mind, of that hobby with which he has so
sedulously endeavoured to ride roughshod over the
will and the properties of a large portion of the in-
habitants of the town.

TIME OF PARLIAMENT CONSUMED IN THE
DISCUSSION OF IRISH AFFAlRS.—Referring to
the complaint of Mr. W. S. O'Brien, that Ireland
is neglected by the British Parliament, the London
Times on Thursday remarks—
" What proportion of time do our readers suppose has
been actually occupied in the two Houses of Parliament
by exclusively Irish subjects? The time we cannot pro-
fess to guess at, but the matter spoken, even as abridged
of some of its most superfluous trash by the judgment of
our reporters, has occupied in our paper, since the Easter
recess only, no less than one hundred and four columns
and three-quarters, and seems but too unlikely to stop
even there. This at least, if not a disproof of, may be
taken by Mr. O'Brien as at least some revenge for the
neglect of the Legislature."

If to this be added the time consumed by the
British press and the British public, in recording
and perusing the ruffianism of O'Connell's repeal
gatherings, it cannot with any degree of reason be
urged that the alleged evils, or the sayings and
doings of the Irish people, do not occupy a full
share of the attention of the world.

A RADICAL GRIEVANCE I—ln the Manchester
Guardian of Wednesday last, we find the following
somewhat amusing paragraph :
" DISGRACEFUL USE OF A COURT OF JUSTICE.—The
sessions-room or moot-hall of the borough of Wigan, on
Monday last, was set apart for the accommodation of the
Orange lodges, who had a grand gala day in that town,
and were honoured' with the company of several of the
more distinguished members of the order. A band, en-
gaged by the body, was playing during the whole of the
day in the neighbourhood of the hall, and an adjacent
public-house, where one of the lodges is held; and the
Orangemen dressed in full uniform, paraded the streets
to and from the building, the door f which was kept by
one of the fraternity. In addition to the above, several
banners bearing the arms of the order, and inscriptions,
Church and state,' Loyal Orange Society,' &c., were
hung from the windows of the grand jury room, outside
the hall, and the members were in deliberation during a
great part of the day, with closed doors. What the go-
vernment will say to this gross perversion of the use of a
public court of justice, if represented to them, remains
to be seen : it certainly reflects the highest discredit on
the authorities of the borough."

A shocking thing, truly, that the "sessions-room
or moot .hall," of the borough of Wigan, should be
occupied—whether they paid or nut for the accom-
modation—by a body of men who, in addition to
their other enormities, their " closed doors," &c.,
could have- the assurance to exhibit from its win-
dows banners bearing inscriptions so offensive to
the eye of liberalism as " Church and State,"
Lourz 0 ran CFA gCts+is.ll%l9 3 t A
might have been held in this same moot- a ;"
and, we venture to say, we should not have had any
great outcry against it from the Manchester Guar-
dian. A dissenting gathering would have been
quite fitting and proper within its walls. But a
meeting of loyalists, whose motto is " Church and
State"—" what will the government say" to such an
enormity ? A place of worship may be desecrated
by anti-corn-law meetings; town councils and ves-
tries may be turned into normal schools of agita-
tion; but a meeting in a court of justice, of men
devoted to the support of the Church and the in-
stitutions of their country, is an enormity which
the Guardian thinks ought to be put down by the
hand of the executive ! Oh, the consummate im-
pudence of " liberalism" !

A RUNNING COMMENTARY UPON CONTEM-
PORARY JoURNALTSM.—A contemporary of Tues-
day last, in an article of stupendous wisdom, enti-
tled " State of Trade," has perpetrated a collection
of dicta, upon which we propose to present to our
readers a " running commentary." Indeed, this
form of criticism is the only one in which we have
found ourselves able, after many fruitless tnals, to
do anything like justice to the production in ques-
tion. We begin ; and now—loquitur the Liverpool
limes :
" STATE OF TRADE.

" The quantity of cotton purchased in Liverpool, by
the manufacturers, in the first half year of 1843, is
648,740 bags, against 568,570 bags purchased in the cor-
responding period of 1842. This gives an increase of
upwards of 80,000 bags in the quantity bought for con-
sumption in the half year just ended, on comparison with
the first half year of 1842, and a still greater increase in
comparison with the consumption of 1841."

The arithmetical question here given is correctly
enough solved. If the consupption of cotton in