The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1845-05-06 00:00:00

LETTER TO LORD SANDON

The wide-extended prospect lies before us,
But shadows, clouds, and darkness rest upon it."

In a brief letter addressed to your lordship last week,
I did little more than suggest two Questions for your con-
sideration, viz., the strange confluence of new lights
which has recently flooded the o;cl world of our political
system, and the extraordinary conduct of a British mi-
nister, who seeks to bribe Irish rebels as his future allies,
and declares his incompetence to put down an incipient
insurgency by force of law, as it now exists, yet declines
adding any stringency of the law to meet the necessity,
while ke would affect to hope for additional support in a
time of national peril from the revolutionary si•irit which
has been chiefly generated by his indecision, and essen-
tially promoted by his political poltroonery.

The distinguished Canning called Peel the " sublime
of mediocrity", which was only anticipating the celebrity
of the " great middleman" of Disraeli 's second philippic.
But hew a man, who never appears to look or to legislate
biond the circumstances of the day, can affect to lead
a new order of statesmen, who belong to the class of

" Perfectionists" of Brother Jonathan, bent on provi-
ding fur the future without learning anything from the
paw., and who adopt the Premier's measures as the means
of the destruction of those very interests which they would
profess to strengthen and consolidate—may remain a pro-
blem for after ages : but we defy any of the present con-
servative supporters of government to solve it, consis-
tently with their own credit. Were it possible for the
recent majority of the Commons to represent the enlight-
ened principles of legislation in the kingdom, and such
principles were at variance with the mass of public opi-
nion, it were then an error in government to force such
legislation on the country, and persist in making laws for
which the people were not prepared : but in that case it
would be morally impossible for such a constellation of
luminaries to agree only on the paltry endowment of a
Popish college, and beyond that to start off from each
'other in mortal oppugnancy. Tin re is a peculiar tyranny
in such legislation, which is neither characteristic of the
c-hig (proper) nor the tory, but partakes rather of the
obstinacy of ignorance and arrogance combined ; urging
on a police having no defined purpose. or " fixity of te-
nure". The debates might indeed teach us that " lan-
guage is given to enable us to disguise our thoughts" :
and were every whig and radical compelled to unmask,
and confess his views and feelings in the support of that
grant, the Tamworth Baronet would be stripped of his im-
posing mantle of statesmanship, and thrown back on the
common level of the trading intellect of the community,
for which alone nature and acquirement alike seem to-
have designed him.

Leaving Sir R. Peel for a moment, I would ask your
lordship whether, in the list of whips and radicals who
supported the Ma!,nooth grant, you can find any man
(with one or two exceptions) who is superior to the ave-
rage common-sense men of an English market town; or
whether there is one in twenty who was elected on account
of his possession of any distinguished knowledge a

~----judgm-
ent as a statesman, and who had studied governmental
policy as a political science,—or, rather. if they were not
almost invariably elected from their unscrupulous adop-
tion of those wild theories of change, in these evil-tem-
pered times, which would resolve the social compact into
its original elements, and break up the very foundations
of government? If such borrowed majority be in the
right, in their estimate of results, the Premier himself
must be wrong: if wrong, where is the moral obligation
of the law so decided on ?

There is another peculiarity, my lord, in the debates.
The petitioners against the grant have been accused of
bigotry! Rather a novel charge this against the advo-
ca C 3 of the right of private judgment in matters of reli-
gion, and the emancipators of the Bible from the thraldom
of the Popish priesthood,—traders in the indulgences of
sin in the living—in the redemption of them from venial
sins, in purgatory, and in masses for the dead ! An
appeal from the exclusive church, which refuses salvation
to all without it pale, in a denunciation of the bigotry of
the free scriptural faith of the British Protestant, whether
conformist or non-conformist, is rather calculated to ex-
cite ridicule th +n to provoke argumentation. It mty be
allowed to pass in latitudinarian whigs and radiclls, who,
having little or no religion, can have no religious preju-
dices; though one m'ght wonder at some of their predi-
lections, were it not for the mysterious congeniality that
is said to exist in extremes.

The voice of the nation, my lord, has Disclaimed the
boasted superiority of statesmanship in the melange of
men and principles which has decided the Maynooth
grant in the House of Commons—a medley of men and
morals as suspicious in its present purposes as in its dis-
tant objects, and made up of views and designs inconsis-
tent as a rule of legislation, and conflicting with each
other.

I never recollect a speech made in the House of Com-
mons embodying more sophistry than that delivered by
Sir R. Peel on Friday night last, and of sophistry without
the ingenuity of subtlety,—especially in that part of it
which JiirPotod fn -e

WUIVII :Jammu to awls= any future intention of endow-
ing the Roman Catholic clergy. It was that of a political
Jesuit, who had neither the courage to shut the door on
the subject, nor keep it open with a candid and steady
hand, but leaving it on the jar, for the whig and radical
rulers who are coming in his wake, a hungry band of
reformers, justified in their hopes and projects by the
levelling labours of the quasi conservative Premier, who
has pioneered their direction in a revolutionary path
which they had not courage to strike out for themselves.
Of all the British ministers. whose history I can trace
in ancient or modern timee, Sir R. Peel is the first who
has chosen to talk about the " weak parts of the British
Empire." Some short time ago he named Canada and
Newfoundland as among our vulnerable points: hence
the concessions made to rebels and levellers, to the dis-
gust of the true British party; and the result has only
served to strengthen the revolutionary faction, arid stul-
tify and disarm the loyalty of the colonies,—so that the
real " weakness" is of .Sir R. Peel's own creation. But
look, my lord, at his language on the subject of Ireland,
in which he admitted that before he strung his nerves to
speak in a bold tone to the United States, he had " sent
a conciliatory message to Ireland"! " Hurrah for Peel
and Repeal!" said O'Connell: " this is a proud day for
Ireland ! Peel confesses that we cannot be put down b 7
force, and that we are only to be won by conciliation !
A proud day for the rebel indeed! for such conduct has
more the appearance of entering into a treaty with him,
than it is like the policy of a minister wielding the ener-
gies of England. Another " Cerberus is contracting for
his sops.'

It is not the object of twenty or thirty thousand pounds,
my lord, or ten times the amount, with the people of
England, could they effect any purpose for betterin! the
condition of the two millions of Irish beggars and pau-
pers, and two mil:ions more of wretched farmers and
cabineers, half living under the gripe of middlemen and
the extortion of absentee landlords. If Sir R. Peel would
look to these, instead of promoting the priestcraft which
holds them in a degradation of bondage that has no equal
on earth in suffering or duration, except God's maledic-
tion against the Jews,—then indeed he will find English-
men respond to his call. Let him direct the inclosure of
the five millions of waste land, under one general govern-
ment inclosure act, with equal divisions among the peo-
ple, to whom they properly belong, as the ancient foc-
land Volk-land), contra-distinguished from boc-land, or
that assigned in books and title-deeds. The presence of
such an extent of land never turned by spade or plough,
in a country where people are perishing by thousands
once in three or four years, for the want of a few pota-
toes, is the disgrace of Europe and an anomaly in the
civilised world. Or if the Premier must follow up whig
principles, let him adopt some of the better portion of
them, and enforce the maxim that " property has its
duties as well as its rights,"—taxing the great absentee
proprietors for the relief of the misery and destitution
which their unnationality has created. Here is a plain
road of duty for tory premiers, as well as whig peers and
leviathan landowners. The west coast of Ireland has
more noble harbours for commerce, or for war when ne-
cessary with the pugnacious United States, than all the
rest of Europe put together. A packet from Galway
would reach America before one from London got out of
soundings ; and the island has more fine rivers, for its
extent, than any country in the world. Where, then, is
the " great difficulty of Ireland", but in the weakness of
the weakest of ministers, who not only connives at the
real cause of its miseries (the Popish creed), but is seek-
ing to promote it, while be is shrinking from his duty in
grappling with the great master rebel, the Irish ogre of

his imagination, who will now only add contempt of
English rule to the former defiance of it, the Premier
having lowered the standard " of the thousand years "
before the green rag of the agitation of yesterday, and
one not to be put down by force" !—a disgrace in lan-
guage England ought never to forget nor to forgive.
Sir R. Peel has anticipated that the destinies of Eng-
land will be consigned to other hands, in the perils of the
I trust that, in this r h-

respec.. ae will prove a true
prophet. God forbid that such a whitefeather as the
Tamworth baronet should ever float in Downing-street,
when the bla't of war is blown in our ears! He would
have confessed, on a hundred different occasions in the
late war, that Napoleon " could never be put down by
force." He has taught us, even in peace, to fear such a
maudlin rule as his, more than Pat in his monster meet-
ings, or Jonathan in his tarnation tantarums.
One certain result, my lord, of these new discoveries
in legislation—or Peel's patent way of giving security to
Protestantism by endowing Popery—will be an increase
in the anti-monarchical party in England, and the anti-
English cabal in Ireland. The object of education in
Maynooth is to give vigour and intensity to Roman Ca-
tholic principles : the more its means, the more its might
to be wielded against its antagonist creed. The Protes-
tant Dissenters of England, exceeding the Irish adherents
of the Pope in wealth, numbers, and intelligence, will
have new and powerful arguments against a quasi Pro-
testant monarchy, dividing empire and exchanging en-
dowments with the Deputy Pope of Ireland. Such a
position will be in dancer of being converted into a new
National Protest against the monarchy itself, as an ex-
travasated power wrested from our constitutional sove-
reignty as a Protestant kingdom. To endure Popery as
an affected friend, is but a short step from identification
with it : the next is to embrace. We have had this il-
lustrated in the short history of Tractarianism—another
ominous defection of the times. We live, my lord, in an
age of strange infatuations.

" It is the very error of the moon :
She comes more near the earth than she was wont,
And drives men mad."

April 241 h, 1845

ALPHA

EARLY CLOSING OF SHOPS.—On Tuesday evening last,
a public meeting was held at the Town-hall, Birkenhead,
for the purpose of representing to the shopkeepers of the
township the advantages to be gained by the closing of
their shops at seven o'clock in the evening. The night
being rough the meeting was thinly attended. The Rev.
Andrew Knox occupied the chair, and many respectable
part:es were present. Resolutions were passed in ficcord-
ance with the object is view.