The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1843-02-10 00:00:00

ROYAL LIVER THEATRE

FOR THE BENEFIT OF MR. BUCKS7'ONE

THIS EVENING, (Friday,) the 10th instant, ti
formances will commence with

e Per-

YOUTH AND AGE ;
Or, The/Twiny Colonel and his Old Woman.
Michael Witzgoff
The Countess Xenia . . . . Mrs Fitzwilliam.

After which,
THE SNAPPING TURTLES.
To be followed by
BELLE OF THE HOTEL ; or, American Sketches

The whole to conclude with
A KISS IN THE DARK

TO MERCHANTS, BROKERS, &c

The largely increased and most respectable circulation
which the Tuesday's Edition of the LIVERPOOL

STANDARD has now obtained amongst the mercantile
body in Manchester affords its proprietors the gratify-
ing power of urging this, amongst the other undeniable
claims which it possesses, upon the favor of that portion
of the mercantile community of Liverpool who desire to
bring their advertisements before the notice of buyers in
the neighbouring manufacturing districts. In most of
the surrounding towns of Lancashire the circulation of
the STANDARD is steadily increasing. In Manchester,
however, the centre of the manufacturing district, our
publication of Tuesday—occurring upon the most im-
portant market day of the Cotton Trade, when its
Exchange and Hotels are thronged with country manu-
facturers, spinners, and calico printers—is firmly es-
tablished in circulation, and is perused with increased
and increasing interest.

Under these encouraging circumstances, we trust to
receive an increased measure of support from the mer-
chants and brokers of the town generally ; and it affords
us great pleasure to assure those of our friends amongst
those classes, who have hitherto bestowed their adver-
tising favours liberally upon us, of our increased ability
to do justice to the interests committed to their care.

ktberpool gstanbatt.

FRIDAY MORNING, FEBRUARY 10, 1843

The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society—as
we anticipated from a body possessed of such a super-
fluity of misdirected zeal and distorted philanthropy—
have come forward already, as the opponents of the
government plan of emigration from Sierra Leone to
the British West Indies, the details of which we re-
cently brought before our readers. The gentlemen in
question are a little in the habit of moving in the dark;
and we therefore know not whether it is with the ap-
proval of their entire body, or only' at the instance of
a few zealots, who presume to lead their agitation in
the name of that body, that the present step has been
taken. Certain it is, however, that their petition, or
rather protest, against the plan propounded by Lord
Stanley, has been presented to Parliament; and we
address to the entire body the few remarks which we
now offer upon the subject.

And first, may we ask of these gentlemen, what is it
that they meditate, as the ultimate fate of those noble
possessions, in which Great Britain has made a great
experiment, whose result has been watched, with
varied emotions, by every slave state, and by every
fettered African upon the face of the globe ? We told
the world that we could raise the valuable produce of
the tropics, by means of free labour, CHEAPER than it
could be raised, in our own or in any other tropical pos-
sessions, by slave labour. As yet, we have not suc-
ceeded. Our failure is notorious. It is acknowledged
in the fact that Ihe very men, who were most sanguine
in the professions which they held out of such a result
being achieved, are at this moment the loudest cla-
mourers for the admission into British ports of the
cheaper produce of slave labour in the Brazils and
elsewhere ! Though aided by high discriminating du-
ties—though, in fact, allowed almost a monopoly of
the home market—the British planter has sunk, year
by year, more deeply into difficulties and embarrass-
ments. Noble properties have dwindled away from
the hands of their possessors; once fertile plantations
have become arid wildernesses; once thriving and

wealthy ports—the marts of a valuable commerce—
have become scenes of insolvency and beggary; and
the conviction is before every man, who has discern--
ment enough to read coming events by the shadows
which _ they cast before, that the time is not many
months distant at which we shall be compelled to with-
hold the only support—the existing protecting duty—
which retards the entire abandonment, by British ca-
pital and British enterprise, of these once• magnificent
colonies.

Did the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society,
when they urged this great experiment upon the nation
—when by their agents upon the platform, or by se-
ductive pamphlets, they fired the public mind to this
attempt—when they preached the doctrine that free
labour in the tropics is cheaper than slave labour ;
did that body then meditate the ruin and failure which
every man of real philanthropy—every real well-wisher
to the African—must now bitterly deplore ? Was it
humanity towards the Negro which inspired them, or
hatred—unforgiving, passionate, furious hatred—to-
wards the British planter ? Or was the mousing incite-
ment to their agitation that love of the admiration of
ignorant assemblies—that fondness for display, when
display is rewarded by the tears of sentimental misses,
and the applause of the self-righteous—which to weak
minds is a feeling so seductive? One of these, or all
these, dilemmas, the anti-slavery party—we refer to
the leaders, not the dupes—must embrace. They
were designing, they were ignorant, they were unprin-
cipled, they were vain! To one of these, or all these,

imputations they must plead " GUILTY."
And now let us see towards which of the above de-
finitions of the motives of the body the present course
of the committee points. We have said that the free-
labnur experiment is, as yet, a failure. For all the
nobler purposes which its success was to secure, it is
so. We proposed, not alone to promote the happiness
and temporal comforts of our own existing Negro po-
pulation in the British West Indies, but to promote,
as well, the adoption of our humane policy by other
slave-holding states. We said we would shew them
that it was the wisest policy; . that, as men of business,
they must adopt it : and, in the exuberance of our
imagination, we trusted that, by the temporary sacrifice
we had made, we had struck a blow at the existence
of slavery in every clime. In these expectations we
have failed ; and, such being the acknowledged fact,
what is the course which the Anti-Slavery Society pro-
pose to our acceptance ? We cannot produce cheaply,
because we cannot procure the necessary quantity of
labour; because, in fact,—and it is a striking fact—
free labour tends so rapidly to THE INDEPENDENCE
! A wise and humane govern-
ment proposes to permit, under a strictly guarded sys-
tem
of immigration, an additional number of the be-
nighted people of a benighted land—of wretched beings '
snatched from the deck of the foreign slave-trader—to
be introduced into those colonies in which industry, so
rapidly and surely, leads to independence : to permit
the native African, torn from his wretched home and
his degrading superstitions, to be placed beneath the
benignant protection of British laws, and the blessed
influences of civilisation and Christianity. In the ac-
quisition of an abundance of willing labour by such a
measure, a wise and, we repeat, a humane government,
sees the last, and only available, human instrumentality,
by which the ruin of valuable possessions, and the
failure of the measure of emancipation, may be averted.
But to this proposition the British and Foreign Anti-
Slavery Society says " No !"
Reader, the conclusion that we are to draw from
such a course—what is it ? We shall not say that the
opposition of the society is grounded upon the fact,
that the planter's ruin is to be averted by the proposed
measure ; because in that we might be wrong, for a
meddling ignoramus sometimes does not know his own
motives, or has none, beyond a wish to be busy. But
that pure, unmixed philanthropy has not the most dis-
tant connexion with the present opposition of the anti-
slavery people, we shall proceed to shew, by analogy.
For the past six years, it is well known, that a sys-
tem, not of emigration, or immigration, but of migra-
tion, has been going on in this country. Forced mi-
gration, too, this was. Migration, not from the swamps
of Africa to fertile Jamaica, Trinidad, or Guiana—not
from barbarism, slavery, and superstition, to civilis
a-
tion, freedom, and Christianity—not from darkness to
light;—but migration from the pure air and healthy
pursuits of the agricultural districts of England, to the
fetid, smoky air, and the debilitating and demoralising
pursuits and society of the manufacturing districts.

OF THE LABOUR

The union workhoUses of the south of England have
furnished the slave depots ; the commissioners of
Somerset House, and the local guardians, have acted
respectively the parts of the slave traders and the native
princes. Pickford's boats, or a cattle train upon the
railway, have supplied the luxuries of a middle passage,
and the millocrats of the manufacturing districts—a
quaker, by the bye, and a member of the Anti-Slavery
Society (!) was the most prominent promoter of the
system—have occupied the place of the slave-owning
planters! Thousands of men, women, and children
have been the victims of this system—to which the
proposed system .of Lord Stanley is as light to dark-
ness—and, we ask, has the Anti-Slavery Society ever
uttered—not a protest but—even a whispered depreca-
tion of it ? Point out to us such a thing ! You can-
not! The victims were WHITE; the parties benefitted
were "liberal" cotton lords, free-trade quakers, phi-
lanthropists, and not loyal British colonists !
Gentlemen, permit us to point your attention to the
result—the denouement—of this measure of hardened
" liberal" infamy. We give it in the words of a
" liberal" member of the House of Commons—Mr.
Ward, the member for St. Albans—he of the far-famed
appropriation clause. Thus spoke the gentleman in
question on Friday evening last ;,

"An honourable member connected with Yorkshire spoke
most feelingly with respect to the labouring population in
that part of the country; but he (Mr. Ward) was prepared
to confirm that testimony from his own knowledge of what
took place in the southern part of the island. Hundreds (of
paupers removed under the migration system of the Poor
Law Commissioners) were day by day coming back upon
their families, ignorant of the pursuits in which those families
were engaged, and therefore in a very short time becoming
candidates for admission into the union workhouses."

Gase upon this picture, gentlemen and ladies—phi-
lanthropists par excellence ! Compare it with the sys-
tem which you have so glibly denounced. Compare
the poor African, at the end of five years, returning,
with a passage paid in a government ship, to the coun-
try which he left penniless and little removed from the
condition of a savage; possessed now of the means of
moderate independence, and the knowledge of the
white man's God—who is his God, too !—with the
worn-out drudges of the factory, returning penniless
to his or her native fields, degraded and debased by
the associations to which the reckless and guilty ava-
rice of others has driven them. You whine of the pos-
sible guiltiness and danger of the former system ; you
wink at the appalling evidences of guilt and danger in
the latter.

Oh, for a• forty-quaker power, to sing

Thy praise, HYPOCRISY?"

When, in our last publication, we remarked upon
the naughty poetical studies of our modest friend,
John Bright, we were certainly not aware that he was
so soon to be brought up in his poetical career. So it
has chanced, however. The exuberant fancy of the
young quaker, and the ignorance of the reporters of
the Manchester Guardian, have brought him into a
serious dilemma. In a recent philippic, delivered in
Manchester, the juvenile quaker described the sup-
porters of agricultural protection as lifting their hand
in the face of the Almighty, and exclaiming, " THou
Foot, !" We are not precise about the exact words;
but the winding up—the climax of the passage—
" thou Fool" is as delivered; and; as is perhaps natural,
the friends of the orator have pretty universally ex-
cepted against the expression in question, as profane
and irreligious.

The objection will be admitted, and now for the ex-
cuse offered. The expression, it appears, from a leader
in the Manchester Guardian, was borrowed from a
poem by Ebenezer Elliott, the Anti-Corn-law Rhymer.
Six or eight lines from the poet in question had been
quoted by friend Bright ; but either the unmusical ear
of the quaker had led him to mar the harmony of the
versification, or the reporters had not " a soul for
music"—Ebenezer Elliott, despite his virulent politics,
is a poet ;—and, as the result, friend Bright's poetical
burst was prosyfied, and upon himself was visited the
reproach which ought to have fallen upon the Shef-
field vendor of steel and poetry.
Now we submit this ought to he a lesson to Bright.
It-ought to teach him that the utilitarian school of po-
litical philosophy is the very worst in which he can let
off his poetical fancies; and in the next place that,
amongst the professedly religious, he must steer very
warily, if he hopes to be witty, or forcible, without
approaching the borders of, the profane. Had we to
advise so silly a youth, we should say " eschew poetry
—eschew everything in the slightest degree above
your very limited comprehension—talk of cotton cops,
warp, weft, longcloths, power looms, mules, spindles,
or the thousand-and-one matters which appertain to
manufacturing pursuits ; but leave poetry and philo-
sophy, and all similar abstract matters, and matters of

taste, to such sublimely-gifted and correct people a:
Cobden or Ashworth, or John Brooks, or the editor;
of the Manchester Guardian." The latter sage: