The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1848-04-11 00:00:00

THE LIVERPOOL STANDARD.

VALUE OF AFRICA AS A PRODUCING
COUNTRY.

(From the Colonial Magazine.)
The gentleman is still alive, or was three years ago, who
imported the first bale of American cotton into Liverpool.
Now, England receives annually from that country a
quantity of no less value than £15,000,000. Of the capa-
bility of Africa to produce cotton, no traveller, who has
noted that continent, fails to remark the excellence and
abundance which is produced of this useful material. Mr.
Dalrymple, who was at Goree in 1776, states " that there
are three different kinds of cotton; that samples sent home
were considered by English merchants to be far superior
to that from the West Indies. It grows spontaneously
almost everywhere. though it is sometimes cultivated."
Before him writes Weaver, who sass, " of the vegetables
that are wild, the sugar-cane, cotton shrub, and indigo,
seem the most valuable. No country in the world is more
amply enriched than this is with the chief productions of
the animal and vegetable kingdoms." Colonel Denham
also states " that cotton grows wild about Sierra Leone,
of three kinds, white, brown, and-pink : the first is excel-
lent." In another part of his travels he observes, " found
it wild on the Tschadda." Park and Clapperton both
bear ample testimony of the superior character of the pro-
ductions of the African looms in the interior. Lander
says, " from Badagry to Saccatoo the cotton-plant, indigo,
&c., are cultivated to a great extent." The Rev. John
Pinney, an American missionary, remarks, " the crops of
coffee, pepper, and cotton, exceed all that could be boasted
of in the United States." The trade in palm oil, raw
cotton, shea butter, rice, and bees'-wax, according to
Laird, could be indefinitely increased. But proofs innu-
merable could be advanced if more was required. Not
only these but the testimony of every traveller into the
interior of Africa could be quoted to the same effect, the
majority also affirming the vastly superior character of
produce over the cotton obtained from any other part of
the world.

Again, coffee, the greater amount of which we receive
from Arabia and Brazil can be obtained of a much better
kind, and far more readily from Africa. Here is its native
country, where forests of it grow wild, affording subsis-
tence to numberless monkeys. It is a fact that all the
coffee brought into England from Arabia comes originally
from the interior of the opposite continent. Hundreds of
tons are annually exported from the fair of Berberah to
Mocha and other Arabian ports. In this manner second
hand from its actual cultivators, and by a circuitous route
round the Cape of Good Hope, it finds its way into the
European markets, and even then competes with the pro-
duce of countries more favourably situated. It is reported
in the proceedings of the African Institute that when Ki-
zell, a Nova Scotian, first observed coffee near the Sher-
bro. he pulled up two or three plants, and showed them to
the people, who said that they thought it was good for
nothing but to fence their plantations. It grew all over
the country, and in some places nothing else was to be
seen. Sir Fowell Buxton has recorded that even in its
wild state it seems to repay the trouble of gathering, for
the Commissioners at Sierra Leone, in their annual reports
for 1838, state " that the Foulahs have been induced by
the poor traders of the River Nunez to bring down for
sale to them a quantity of coffee, the produce of the fo-
rests of their own country." We are told also by Ash-
man, in his life, that in Liberia no crop is surer, for that
African coffee frequently produces four pounds to the tree,
and that the berries attain a size unknown elsewhere.
The low countries to the south of Abyssinia, we also
know, yield an inexhaustible supply, for whole caravans of
this useful berry are continually being forwarded through
the Adal country to the coast opposite Men, whilst vast
quantities reach Zanzibar from the interior in the same
direction, and is exported to India.
Indigo is another indigenous product of Africa ; it grows
abundantly on the banks of all the intertropical rivers.
Of late years it has been made a profitable source of re-
venue to the sagacious Pacha of Egypt, who, in the coun-
tries around the upper course of the Nile, has encouraged
culture and manufacture of this important dye.
Africa was the source from whence the rest of the world
derived their knowledge of, and the first supply of, indigo.
At least, its general name in the East is nil ; and whether
the river of Egypt has given its name to the plant, or the
important produce of its banks has conferred an honour-
able and permanent title to the river, the inference is na-
tural that, in the country surrounding its course, indigo
was first employed as a dye, and that from thence it tra-
velled, with many other useful facts of ancient Egyptian
civilisation, about the period when the nations of Europe
and Asia appear to have been emerging from the darkest
ignorance of barbarism Ah ! indeed, well may we ob-
serve, how little is deemed to be owing to Africa by the
rest of the world that has so benefited by the moral revo-
lution which determined the transition, from society as it
was in the times of the pyramids and rock temples of
Egypt, to that which it is at present.
One remark more as regards the abundance of indigo to
be obtained from Africa. It is the weed of that continent.
All over its tropical portions it grows so freely that it is
difficult to eradicate it. In 1828 Mr. Smart, writing to
Sir G. Murray, says—" Immense quantities of indigo and
other noxious weeds spring up in the streets of Freetown."
Captain Denham also observes, that "inland, as far as
Lake Tchad, the natives give a beautiful dye to the clothes
with a rude preparation of the wild plant."

IRISH IMMUNITY AND IRISH WRONGS.

(From the Times.)

There is no animal under the sun, nothing that runs,
flies, swims, burrows or creeps, or crawls, so free as the
Irishman. He can sit on his dunghill, and publicly curse
his King and his country. He may openly employ him-
self in casting bullets, in hitting penny-pieces at fifty
paces, in pike practice, in sword practice, in dagger prac-
tice, in reaping-hook practice, besides those rougher arts
of destruction in which he is already practised to perfec-
tion. He may announce that the Queen's troops are
the objects of these pious exercises. Yet he cannot be
interfered with. Such is the law. Should the day ever
arrive that a hundred thousand barrels are levelled from
the windows and roofs of the Irish metropolis against
the troops and the loyal inhabitants in general, the law
may then be appealed to. In that crisis, we presume, it
will no longer be indecisive. If there is time to lay a
case before Her Majesty's Attorney-General, and the
Viceroy is alive to lay it, and should the troops be also in
existence, we shall then, doubtless, have a most excellent
legal opinion, which will henceforth take its place in our
books of law, setting forth that if the troops still survived,
it was not punishable in them to fire in return.
Whatever is permitted to man an Irishman can do if he
chooses. Unfortunately, nature is not equally accommo-
dating, and hence all this rebellion. An Irishman cannot
cower over a turf fire or bask in the sun from one August
to another and then find a splended crop of wheat or
potatoes on hii land self-sown, self-furrowed, and self-
cleared. He cannot find his barrel of meal always full
however freely he may have drawn from it. His coat
wears on his back and his shoes on his feet, especially
when he never puts a needle to either. His hut does not
thatch or glaze itself. He cannot keep his hands in his
podkets from Monday morning to Saturday night, and
then find seven shillings regularly there at the end of the
period. Ile cannot shoot ten gentlemen's stewards in
succession and the gentleman himself last of all, and yet
find a free influx of English capital and skill to fill up the
gap. He cannot meet with the most brutal ingratitude
the assistance he has begged in the most abject whines
and then find loans and grants as plentiful as ever. He
cannot indulge in the indolence, the uncleanliness, and
the ferocity of the lower animals and yet find hmself at-
taining the dignity of a man. These are impossibilities.
They are found to be impossibilities by many persons in
England, in Scotland, and still more in certain other
countries. They are also impossibilities in Ireland.
They are so by the irrevisible laws of Nature and of Pro-
vidence. Yet they are at the bottom of the Irishman's
grievance. The union he wants to repeal is the universal
union between natural cause and effect, between industry
and reward, between cleanliness and comfort, between
obedience and peace, between good social habits and na-
tional prosperity. There is a saying of foreigners that the
English appear to think the Messiah came and suffered for
them alone. The Irish appear to imagine they have an
exclusive right to the blessings of Providence. We say this
on the fullest consideration. As we have frequently ob-
served, every Irishman has just the same chances in his
favour as every Englishman. He has the same laws and the
same opportunities. Ninety-nine out of every hundred in-
habitants of this island find it a very wretched, beggarly,
unkind, uncomfortable place unless they work very hard,
are up early and late, practise all kinds of shifts, deny their
appetites and tastes, cut jovial society, submitwith patience
to irksome control, extinguish their tempers, discipline
their tongues, abstain from offence, practise mutual for-
bearance and accommodation, and, in fact, live lives of
voluntary and honourable servitude. - By the practice of
these homely habits we just contrive to patch up a tolera-
ble show of decency and comfort. The Irishman sees
and envies ; wants to grasp the result, but will not con-
descend to the means.