The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1848-05-09 00:00:00

TO ADVERTISERS.

We beg respectfully to call the attention of
Merchants, Brokers, Auctioneers, and others,
to the important fact 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
mall arrive in the course of the morning.

Eht Eiberpoot Manbarb.

TUESDAY MORNING, MAY g, 1848

The great problem of the present day is the
question " What are we to do with our labour ?"
It is the problem which European nations have
broken up their social and political arrangements
in the hope of solving ; and which has at length
been forced upon the attention of the thinking por-
tion of the people of Great Britain by the blind
policy of their rulers. What are we to do with our
labouring masses ? We have hands to till the soil
more than we allow the soil to support. We have
hands to spin, to weave, to work at all the varied
sorts of artisanship carried on by a civilized and
industrious people ; and remunerative employment,
a recompense for their labour sufficient to keep
body and soul together, for barely two thirds of
them. We have thrown off, as unworthy of our
enlightened (?) age, the good, the old, the English
and the wholesome axiom that the man who is
taxed for us, and fights for us, is of our blood,
speaks our language, bows at the same shrine and
is warmed by the same historic memories, ought
to be preferred to the stranger in the contest for
the means of existence; we have laid it down as
our policy that we buy labour, and all other com-
modities " in the cheapest market ;" and we have
now seriously, and imperatively, to consider what
we are to do with the labourer, whose birthright
we have transferred to another.
We cannot keep him in our workhouses. Ex.
perience is warning us of this fact. The miserable
dole of charity falls far behind the drain which is
daily made upon it. The classes above the labourer,
upon whose shoulders we throw the burthen of
such support, are themselves in a condition of
struggle and embarrassment. We can do with no
temporary remedies—no soup kitchen policy ;—for
the evil is likely to be permanent and increasing.
There is no prospect of continuous and supporting
,employment for above two thirds of the working
portion of the British people; and the other third
must by some means be got rid of. They are dan-
gerous. All starving men are. The cries of the
belly are the most effective provokers of Revolution
and civil strife. What then is to be our course ?
There is but one answer. The world is wide enough
for us all still; and other lands must provide for
the helpless masses, whom we reject and throw
upon their own resources. Emigration, then, must
be the lot of those masses. There is nothing else
left for them. The holy ties of fatherland must be
sundered ; and these once happy islands must pour
out their best blood to fertilize the prairies of
America, or to people the wilds of Australia.
But we have a duty to perform towards these,
our fellow subjects, which we have too long neg-
lected. We have a duty, also, to perform towards
ourselves. We may encourage their mere emigra-
tion. We may say to them, you shall be allowed,
nay, aided, to cast aside your penury, to become
tillers of a soil which will yield you the means of
existence and even of independence; but we ought
to do more. A wise and paternal government
would colonize, instead of casting adrift, these un-
fortunates ; would render them the instruments,
in God's hands, of promoting the spread of civi-
lization throughout the world's untrodden places,
and of planting Christian and British communities
in lands where the heathen and the savage have
for ages maintained their blind superstitions. Such
a government would revolutionize our present
system, which withdraws its fostering hand at the
very moment when a British subject leaves our
shores to seek protection and support in other
climes. That system is well described in an article
from which we quote, contained in this month's
number of Fraser's Magazine :
" Our colonist sets out—his wife and children attending
him—probably on foot. from one of the midland counties.
He may, or he may not, beg his way to the coast, but at
the coast he arrives, and finds that a ship has already been
freighted to receive him, and hundreds like him; with-
out, however, the smallest pains having been taken to
place the whole under the guidance either of law or of
leader. He passes to his wretched berth—is conveyed
like a dog across the Atlantic—arrives, wayworn and de-
-1 ected, at Quebec, and reports himself at the office of the
emigrant agent. Here he is informed that, upon payment
.of a dollar a-head for himself and his family, he will be
carried up and down the country until he has fixed upon
a place of settlement. It is almost always a hard matter
-to find these dollars, retaining at the same time money
wherewith to buy food for his own and his children's sup-
port until he has obtained employment. Nevertheless,
such is the rule, and if it had been explained to him be-
fore he left England he would have no right to complain.
But no such information had ever been afforded him ; and
now he is at his wits' end. If he be an Englishman, he
p 'obably makes the best of his way forthwith to the States,
and, laying aside with his allegiance his old habits and
feelings, becomes in a short space of time an exaggerated
specimen of the most exaggerated description of Yankee.
If he be Irish, and a large majority of those who seek
new homes on the other side of the Atlantic come of a
Milesian stock, then a different course is pursued ; and
its results are unfortunately more distressing. Irish
emigrants are not generally liked by the old colonists,
nor are they on their first arrival up to the sort of work
to which they are put. The wages offered to them are
accordingly inferior to those which men habituated to the
climate receive ; and as they would consider their dignity
compromised by accepting such terms, they stand aloof,
or have recourse to begging. By and bye comes the
winter, and with it their miseries begin in earnest. It
was no great hardship: during a Canadian summer to be
lightly clad or indifferently housed, charity supplying all
the while funds wherewith to keep body and soul to-
gether. But the case is widely different in the long,
bitter season which succeeds. There is little work to be
got then, if the emigrant were ever so willing to undertake
it ; and, as he has earned nothing before the evil days set
in, the task of supporting him devolves upon the more
industrious portion of the community. Here, then, he
is, not a bit better off than he was at home, saddled upon
the people who never had the smallest desire to see him,
- and upon whom, properly speaking, he has no claim ; and
' as a necessary result, he is informed with the first return
of spring that they can do no more for him, and that he
must shift for himself. By this tjme be has learnt the
lesson which experience teaches, that he cannot, any more
than his neighbours, dispense with food and clothing ;
and that these things are as little to be had without per-
sonal exertion in the new world as in the old. He
makes, therefore, a move to find work. either upon the
terms which he originally rejected or upon others less ad-
vantageous. Perhaps he may succeed. Employment is
offered to him as a lumberer ; thatis to say, he is hired
to hew wood in the back country : in which case he pro-
vides himself with an axe bought out of an advance of
wages ; packs up his goods and chattels (a process which
usually occupies no great length of time), and bending
his steps towards the forest is never heard of or seen
again. But this is not always tree d even of an Irishman.
Lumbering may not offer, or even
of decline it.
In this case he looks across the border, and fancies that
the sun shines there with a splendour which it never sheds
upon the woods and vales of Canada. The same fancy
forthwith takes him which took his English fellow-emi-
grant at the beginning, and journeying southward or
westward as his fancy dictates, he becomes a most turbu-
lent citizen of the model republic. Or last, though by no
means least, of all, it comes to pass that, having made
his way to the sea-coast, and agreed to work his passage
home, he comes back after an absence of a year to be
once more a burden upon those who flattered themselves
that they had long ago got rid of him for ever, and to
hinder others of his class from exchanging a state of
misery of which they know the extent, for one of which
. they have as yet had no experience.
" Such is the way in which nine times out of ten emi-
gration is managed among us. We do not mean to say
that there are no exceptions to the rule. If a man have
capital, however small, and know how to employ it judi-
ciously ; and if, moreover, he start with a determination
to work hard, and to undergo, without repining, many
and severe privations ; there is a fair probability that, in
regard to physical comfort at least, after a lapse of years,
he will find his account in the step which he has taken.
But by far the greater number of those who leave our
shores leave them without any capital at all ; and flying
from the ills which press upon them at home, find them-
selves encumbered with others, different it may be in their
nature, but at least as difficult to be borne. And the re-
wult is too often such as we have described above. Those
ho do not return home, either spend their days in the

bush, in a state little removed from barbarism, or, with
feelings of bitter animosity against the land which having,
given them birth refused to support them, they go oat
from her, and devote to the service of the stranger ener-,
gies which, if she had directed them aright, would have
served to carry her institutions, and to extend herinflu-
ence, to the furthest cm ners of the earth."
We must amend this wretched system, which is
thus planting aliens of our own blood throughout
the world ; and at the same time depriving us of
valuable aids for the employment of our home
population. We have lands in every zone, capable
of producing, by the agency of British capital and
energy, every requisite for our comfort and our in-
dustry—raw materials, food and luxuries,—and of
consuming in return, exclusively, the products of
our labour. But we are madly neglecting our
great mission. We are saying to our people "go
forth and live, or beg, or starve, on the world's
highway, as ye may deserve," whilst we withdraw
from them every protection and privilege, every
kindly office and brotherly sympathy, which they
ought to command in virtue of their misfortunes,
if we are even too blind to see their importance as
a selfish question. We might, and must colonize,
instead of merely casting out. We might render
every British subject, who leaves our shores in
search of a mart for his industry, a feeding offshoot
of the country which he has abondoned. We
might people the world's solitudes with British
communities, bound to us by the ties of gratitude
and affection. At present, we are only contributing
to found inimical communities in every land to-
wards which the tide of emigration sets from our
shores.