The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1848-03-21 00:00:00

TO ADVERTISERS.

beg respectfully to call the attention of

Merchants, Brokers, Auctioneers, and others,

to the important f

ad that the

LIVERPOOL STANDARD

IS NOW THE

ONLY

NEWSPAPER

PUBLISHED WEEKLY ON TUESDAY,

which can be read on that day by the thousands
of Manufacturers and others attending
THE TUESDAY'S MARKET IN
MANCHESTER.

The STANDARD is taken at all the Newsrooms

and respectable Inns in that town and the

surrounding manufacturing district,

A SECOND EDITION is published at Half-past
Two, in time for the North Mails, containing the
MARKETS, and any news of importance that
may arrive in the course of the morning.

rht Zibtrpool &tanbarb.

TUESDAY MORNING, MARCH 21, 1848

WE were unwilling, so long as any evidence
existed of a disposition. on the part of the idle
and disorderly portion of our population, to con-
vert the claims put forward by certain of our la-
bouring classes into an excuse for riot and disorder,
to enter into an examination of their justice, or of
the extent to which the authorities of the town
ought to endeavour to meet them. Thanks, how-
ever, to the firmness, prudence, and watchful fore-
thought displayed by his Worship the Mayor and
his brother magistrates ; thanks to the loyal spirit
evinced by our merchants and tradesmen, in so
cheerfully tendering their aid to repress outrage ;
and, above all, thanks to the patient spirit and
excellent conduct of the suffering classes them-
selves, we can now address ourselves to the task,
without the danger of exciting any irritated feel-
ings, or of seeming to yield to mob dictation.

There are few men, we should imagine, who will
not admit the existence of a large amount of dis-
content and ill-feeling, on the subject of the ar-
rangements under which the business of our port
is conducted, amongst the classes in question—the
porters and labourers in our docks and warehouses.
Ostensibly, such ill-feeling was recently directed
by those classes against alleged abuses of the pre-
sent system—the paying of men in public-houses,
the granting of licenses as master porters to parties
keeping public-houses, beer-shops, or boarding-
houses, and the employment by such parties of
inefficient hands who might be willing to submit
to unjust exactions. But we know well enough
that these were not the real grievances felt. We
know that they are not of consideration and amount
sufficient to excite any serious discontent. Amongst
the whole of our master porters there are only two
or three who are either publicans or lodging-house
keepers; and the apparent concession, therefore,
by which the complaints of the classes aggrieved
were met by the Dock Committee, can be produc-
tive of no healing effect. The grievances were
either imaginary or they still exist. The latter is
the conclusion the most safely to be drawn; and
we would most earnestly warn the merchants and
the authorities of Liverpool against the danger of
entertaining any other.
The extension throughout every branch and de-
partment of the business of the port, by which the
porter or the labourer is employed, of the principle
upon which our dock warehousing system is
founded—a principle whose essence is monopoly—
is the grievance really felt by the labouring classes.
And not by them alone is this grievance felt. It
is shared by the masters and employers of labour
in many of the most important trades of the town.
These men, along with the mass of our porters and
labourers, see absolutely closed against them the
Albert Dock and its warehouses. The porters,
coopers, and others, see a large portion of the
business of the port as absolutely withdrawn from
their reach and competition as if it was removed
from the Mersey altogether. They tace,in this spe-
cimen and gtrm of the new system the foundation
of a monopoly, which must in time crush all inde-
pendent exertion, and virtually annihilate some of
the leading trades, whose prosperity has been hi-
therto regarded as a great element of the general
prosperity and progress of our town. The recent
enactment by which the porterage business, in the
open docks of the port, was handed over to licensed
master porters, each privileged to discharge the
entire cargo of a vessel, shutting out all individual
competition, and denying even to the owner of
any part of such cargo the right to employ his
own servants to handle his own merchandise, is
justly regarded as evidence of that monopolising
and centralising spirit amongst our mercantile
body, the perfect operation of which is to be found
in the Albert Dock and its warehouses. Happily
this measure has been a failure. It is condemned
by its own framers. It is more expensive than the
old system ; and whilst the labouring man under
it is fleeced of a portion of his reward, the mer-
chant and the community are not benefited in
proportion. But granting that this grievance may
be removed, that its intolerable pressure may pro-
cure in time the adoption of the old or of a new
system, we have still the close dock and warehouse
system, winding its thraldom round our tradesmen
and our labouring classes, and threatening ulti-
mately not to leave a day's work or a day's pay
within the reach of any tradesman or labourer who
has not been fortunate enough to find favour in
the sight of that public body which seeks to mo-
nopolise the entire business of the port • and we
entertain a thorough conviction that to the further
extension of no such system will or ought any
community to submit.

It may lie quite true that, thus far, we have had
no manifestation, on the part of the labouring
classes, that this is the grievance against which
their hostility is immediately addressed. Men of
that class do not ordinarily look beyond the im-
mediate evil which afflicts them, or contemplate the
approach and effect upon their. condition of one
which may be years in reaching them. But the
complaint of the body of porters against the system
recently introduced into our open docks was, virtu-
ally, a complaint against the centralizing system
which is being carried out by the Dock Committee.
And, although the labouring porters themselves
might not precisely see the connexion existing be-
tween the two descriptions of monopoly, they owed
much of the popular sympathy with which their
complaints were regarded to classes more informed,
by whom the connexion was clearly enough dis-
cerned. The monopoly of a single ship's discharg.
ing by a merchant master porter seemed to them,
and was felt by them, as intolerable enough ; but
there were not wanting in the community those
who looked to the more gigantic monopoly erecting
by the Dock Committee. If favouritism and un-
just exclusion from work could be occasionally prac-
tised by the individual master porter, upon what
an infinitely extended scale might it not be prac-
tised by the public body in question

But it is not the fact that the working classes
and tradesmen of the port are blind to the fate
which is impending over them. Many of them are
already watching the growth of the Dock Warehouse
Monopoly with feelings of intense alarm. They see
in prospect a power which will be able by its arbi-
trary fiat to decide the fate of individuals and of
entire classes ;to say to the former—H we will not
accept of your labour in our docks and warehouses ;
seek employment elsewhere, in some other port "
and to the latter—" we have decreed the extinction
of your calling as one of the independent trades of
the port. Henceforth we shall only allow it to be
carried on by our own servants." The committee
are already their own porters, their own lumpers,
their own samplers and their own coopers; and
both workmen and masters in other branches of
trade and industry are very naturally inquiring
where is the security that their own shall not he
invaded. There are not wanting, either, persons
unconnected with such trades, who are asking
themselves rather startling questions with respect
to the future political influence of the committee,
and the extent to which those employed under it
will be permitted to remain free agents and to ex-
ercise the privileges of Englishmen.
Such feelings and fears, we can assure the Dock
Comu

ttee and the auth-orities of the town, have
not only taken deep root in the minds of the people
ily increasing; and we wonld most
upon both the ifeeessitycif bestOn-iiik
melt' attention. The principle upon

but are rapit

strotog,ly Ur

apoailiew A ti,

which the Dock Warehouse system is conducted is
unpopular; and its extension will not be endured.
Indeed, the power which the committee is seeking
is one whose gigantic extent is scarcely compatible
with the security of the labourer from oppression, of
the tradseman from proscription,or the community
from arbitrary dictation. Persist in setting at de-
fiance this feeling of repugnance to this system ;
place the trades and the industry of the port more
completely under the arbitrary control of a public
body ; and you erect at once an object against
which, on the first occasion of popular ferment, the
passions of the mob will be directed. It is of little
import whether or not the grievances over which
the masses brood are as great as they are regarded.
The fact that they are entertained, at all, is a con-
sideration which ought to have weight. And when,
as in the case of the Dock Warehouse system, it is
notorious that the rights of large bodies of the
community to compete for their fair share of the
business of the port are circumscribed, or taken
away altogether; and an authority is set up which
is to dictate who is to work and who is to starve,
what branch of trade is to be swamped and what to
be left untouched, it is imperatively the duty of
those to whom the charge of maintaining order is
committed, to endeavour to appease the public
mind, and to remove the cause by which it is
excited.

We trust that the whole subject will now receive
the consideration which it demands ; not only from
the Dock Committee and the Council, but from the
constituencies as well. The question is no longer
one between the Dock Committee and the Ware-
house Owners. It is not, either, as to the pro-
priety or impropriety of building warehouses round
the dock quays. What the public will demand is,
that the vast Dock estate of this port shall not be
so managed as to oppress any trade or any class, or
to excite feelings dangerous to the peace of the
community. Perhaps the best course for all parties
would be to relieve the Dock Committee from their
present unpopular position and, at the same time,
to satisfy the public mind, by leasing the docks
and warehouses to individuals or companies.