The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1842-07-22 00:00:00

FRIDAY MORNING, JULY 22, 1842

The late calamitous event which has occurred to the
heir of the French monarchy has excited the fears of
every friend to the peace of France and of Europe.
After all the revolutionary movements; after all the
blood which she has shed in torrents—on the scaffold
and in the field; after all the millions of treasure which
she has lavished, and the giant energies which she has
put forth for the attainment of the countless visions
which have dazzled her frivolous and restless popula-
tion; France is still a working volcano of passion and
power, which the impulse of a moment, or the accident
of an hour, may let forth to devastate the world, and
to achieve the ruin of herself, one of the finest empires.
The revolution of July has done little for the quiet-
ing of her unruly spirit. Nay, it has done worse than
nothing. It has dazzled the turbulent amongst her
population with expectations, and then mocked at and
falsified them. That revolution aimed at a republic ;
it achieved only—a monarchy surrounded by republican
institutions ! It aimed at the universal supremacy of
the French nation in Europe and throughout the world.
It achieved only—Louis Philippe ! And at this mo-
ment the nation burns under the consciousness of its
own discomfiture, and is only kept down in a state of
uneasy, threatening calm, by the unrivalled policy,
wisdom, duplicity, or what you will, of one man, the
founder, the first, if not the last, of the dynasty of
Orleans.

The position of that man, and of the people whom
he rules, is so well described by a writer in the Foreign
Review for this month, that, at a time like the present,
when so many anxious eyes are directed to France and
her prospects, we cannot resist here quoting the ob-
servations of that writer :

" Suppose a man placed in a situation of daily perplexity ;
having to consult not one interest, but half a dozen ; finding,
before each point that he would arrive at, a thousand ob-
stacles that he does not know of; and being compelled to
advance or retreat, to wind or to double, according to the
opposition which he meets with, and of which no single
party can hold count. We cry out perfidy because the man
gives his word and breaks it.; because he does not go straight
to his point but obliquely ; because he uses friends as tools
met ely, and seems when be has done with them to throw
them away.

" Such a man has Louis Philippe been. Of the three
parties in the country, two he must have displeased : he has
ended by discontenting all. Not one single soul out of his
thirty-five millions of subjects (subjects is not the word, we
forgot what substitute the July revolution found for it)
trusts him or loves him. He moves among all parties quite
solitary. Ministers and generals come and have their audi-
ence, and cringe, and smile, and disappear. The king has
vast shrewdness and memory. He knows how many cabi-
nets Monsieur Mole has formed part of : how many oaths
Monsieur Pasquier has taken : in what a variety of port-
folios Monsieur Guizot has locked up his papers—this, with
a fine imperial eagle upon it, that with a shield bearing three
gold lilies, the last with the cognizance of the charte that
was to be a truth after 1830:—he knows that Monsieur
Thiers, after his protestations of love and loyalty, will ex-
ert himself to the very utmost to destroy the foundations of
his monarchy, and that his aim, and the aim of his party, is
a republic : Couriers Francais and Siectes, Chambolles,
Barrots, and their like, he knows that their loyalty is a mere
fiction, and could they catch him tripping, or off his guard,
that the Orleans family must go as their august cousins have
gone before them. He cannot tell the truth, but two parties
in the country are ready to swear that he is perjured : he
cannot give fifty pounds in charity, but Carlists and repub-
licans sneer at him for not giving more : he cannot go
abroad, but republicans are ready behind every tree to mur-
der him ; or stay at home, but men cry out, " Look at the
tyrant lurking in his palace, and trembling before an of-
fended people !" The friends who raised him to the throne
have disclaimed him, and cursed the day on which they ever
trusted him. And every night when he goes to bed, his wife
thanks God for having preserved him yet one day longer,
and trembles for the next and what it may bring."

It is now vain to speculate whether, in the person of
the unfortunate Duke of Orleans, France would have
found a monarch suited for the emergency upon which
he would have been thrown, upon the death of this
master politician ; whether he could have won her fickle
spirits to the contemplation of a state of calm and
rational liberty, or curbed their uneasy longings for
blood and conquest. But that a regency will fail in
doing this we are as confident as that we now exist.
A dark prospect lours upon unhappy France; and the
only hope that we dare indulge in respecting it—and
Lord Palmerston's meddling hand has left that a slen-
der one—is, that England may not be drawn into its
vortex of ruin.

That appalling distress exists through the country,
and amongst the manufacturing districts especially, is
too certain. It needed not the evidence of the sages
of the late Clayton-square gathering to assure us of
that fact. The hideous form of Poverty stalks over
the land. Pale, hungry faces gaze upon us from be.
neath many a roof-tree which, but as yesterday, rung
with happy laughter or with wild riot. Gaunt forms
start up on every side—their rags fluttering in the
wind, and frenzy or despair shining out from their
blood-shot eyes—which, but as yesterday, walked
stalwart and erect in health and comfort. A blight,
deadly as the hot breath of the simoom, has fallen upon
the industry of England; and the shopkeeper, the
msoelrachtealynt;etlhree sl
ledhiipnowtnheer,parnd ospeevetenote millionaire
fhhisfasth
accumu-
lating
wo
hoards, reel and sicken in the busy marts of
scommerce
shockorwhich in i
ch has their
spread desolation and w
suburban palaces,
t
around the humble hearths of the industrious poor.
That all this, and more, is true, we know ; and the
causes which have produced it and the proper remedies
to be applied for its removal are what we desire ear-
nestly to arrive at. But is this important object to be
attained amidst brawling public meetings or even
amidst the struggles of contending debaters in parlia-
ment ? Is the cool and patient deliberation, which
such a subject eminently requires, to be found in the
frothy declamation of platform orators ? Is it to be
found in the pot-walloping auditories who meet to
shout, and, if need be, to riot at such gatherings—in
mobs of lumpers and hodmen, tinkers and sweeps ?
Are questions which the wise approach not, save with
doubt and fear, to he solved by men who would be
puzzled to put together a milkman's score, or even by
men, cunning in arithmetic, deep in tare and tret, and
learned in the ledger, yet ignorant as the spectacles
upon their own noses or the four-and-ninepenny hats
which cover their cranial developements of everything
which lies deeper beneath the surface of ordinary ken
than the stones beneath the dust of a macadamised

highway ? No! A flock of geese did once save the
Roman capitol ; but we should as little expect to hear
of a tribe of donkeys being taught to bray most mu-
sically by Ifithem's system as to see the intricacies of
the present disastrous condition of England unravelled
by such stilted or muddy philosophers.

Seven years ago we revelled in prosperity—commer-
cial, manufacturing, and monetary. We projected
railways, which have since absorbed seventy millions of
capital. We threw away millions more, with the

recklessness of madmen, in foreign mines, in joint
stock schemes at home and abroad, of every imagina-
ble degree of folly. We lent our millions to every
bankrupt state throughout the old world and the new.
At home, loom was added to loom, factory to factory,
chimney to chimney, until we dwelt at length " in a
murky, simmering tophet of copperas fumes, cotton
fuz, gin, riot, wrath, and toil"; and called this reck-
less gambling, squandering, and improvidence—PßO-
SPEßlTY ! The markets of the world were opened
to us. India, America, China, the East and the West,
cried out to us, or were said to cry, for our products.
We satisfied their craving importunity. We could at
the rate we then progressed have satisfied by this the
craving of THREE WORLDS SUCH AS OUR OWN !
We shook the paper rags of our joint stock hanks in
the face of the wondering states of Europe ; and, in
our drunken frenzy, we told them that these, which
had made every petty owner of a loom-shoop into the
lord of a factory—which had made petty retailers of
soap and candles into foreign merchants—which had
raised scheming attorneys or beggared tradesmen into
bank, mine, or railway directors—which had promoted
men of cotton and calico from fried bacon and pota-
toes to turtle and venison—from buttermilk or beer to
claret and champagne—from a cottage in the back
lanes of Bolton or the smoke canopied streets of Man-
chester to a villa or a place, and, how often! to a
HALL in some embowered retreat where they could
" babble of green fields ;—these paper rags, under
whose Magical influence nothing that is ignorant, vul-
gar, and beggarly

" But did suffer a rare change

Into something rich and strange,"
we held up in the face of the world, and with idiot
laughter proclaimed the belief that they would enable
us to carpet its green face with our productions, and
hang calicoes and Manchester prints upon every tree
in every clime to which the winds could waft them
We were PROSPEROUS then—so at least we were
told by the very gentlemen who clamour now so loudly
upon the subject of distress which has come upon us,—
by the Liberals, par excellence,—by corn law agita-
tors,—by philosophers, who have a panacea ready for
the radical cure of those very evils which seven years,
aye, and less than seven years ago, they could not even
foresee ! We enjoyed then, at least, MANUFACTURING
PROSPERITY. We spun, wove, dyed, and printed for
the whole world. 'We undersold every competitor in
every market. The Potters, the Cobdens, the Ash-
worths, the Brookses, et hoc genus omne, raked toge-
ther gold in spadesful ; sprung from their dunghills
into the seats of the aristocracy of our land; scram-
bled into parliament ; hung around the Board of Trade
for sops with all the earnestness of veteran placemen ;
badgered the doors of the Home-office for dignities,
to gild withal the rotten materials from which their
greatness had been patched together. These men could
not see that their boasted prosperity was but a cheat-
ing dream. Yet these are the men, we are told, who
alone are politically wise ! These men, in their day of
fancied success, saw in the poor workman from whose
toil, in the factory or the loom-shop, the mine or the
print-works, their state was pampered, the mere ma-
chine for whose regulation in working order and due
subjection a coarser kind of food, a new poor law,
union bastiles, a Bens-d'arraerie, must be provided; yet
it is they who are now the exclusive friends of the
working man ! By these men it was that, one week af-
ter it was proved to the satisfaction of a committee of
parliament that, in the midst of manufacturing prospe-
rity, the hand-loom weavers of Lancashire were in a
state bordering upon starvation, the INFAMOUS SUG-
GESTION was made to the poor law commission to de-
luge the whole manufacturing districts with the PAUPER
LABOUR of the south of England !—(Edmund Ash-
worth, of Bolton, stand forward and answer this
charge !) ; and yet such men, who in their very pros-
perity—in the very midst of their money getting—put
into operation the giant energies of the Somerset-house
despotism, to reduce the cost of manufacturing labour,
are at this moment the foremost in their disgusting,
canting, hypocritical professions of sympathy with the
wretched people whom their own grasping avarice has
ruined! WHIG SYMPATHY WITH POPULAR SUF-
FERING ! The sympathy of the vampire with the
writhing of the half breathing form whose blood it has
just drained.

It is not surely from such men that England in her
day of tribulation will accept advice or aid. Venal,
selfish, treacherous are they all. The very measures
which they seek, in the hour of his great necessity, to
impose upon the judgment of the poor man, are de-
vised in treachery and fraud—for the benefit of the
liberal merchant and the liberal millocrat, and not for
that of the suffering people whom they gull at their
gatherings, and strive to stimulate to frenzy and out-
rage. The repeal of the corn laws—the Alpha and
Omega of their political wisdom—what is it but a hol-
low scheme to bring about a few years more of the
same description of PROSPERITY (!) which visited us
seven years ago—to enable a few more Cobdens and
other fungi to grow up amongst us and strengthen
until the odour of the soil from which they have
arisen is rendered imperceptible by a covering of gold
—when the vast fabric will again be prostrated, and
ruin and desolation, wider and deeper than even now
they are, with a social earthquake to darken their hor-
rors, must be precipitated upon our heads ? No-
thing ! The whole course of remedy propounded by
Whig philosophy we pledge ourselves to prove at once
SELFISH, FRAUDULENT AND REVOLUTIONARY !