The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1842-11-22 00:00:00

question ;" but, rather, meet them by that resistless
power of argument which the cause of truth and order
possesses within itself. Meet them thus in parliament;
and call upon every true Conservative out of doors to
weigh and reflect upon the facts and reasoning thus
submitted to them, and to re-echo them, as the best
reply to the agitation of their indefatigable opponents.
It is the duty of Conservatives, whether they fear
the pliability.of Sir Robert Peel or not, to strengthen
the hands and re-assure the confidence of that states-
man in what we conscientiously believe to be his
honest convictions of the right, in contradistinction to
his mistaken convictions of the politic and the expedient.
And further, we say that, unless they do this, they can-
not consistently complain if he is driven from the path
of stern resistence to dictation, into the path of bit-by-
bit concession! Look around us; view the "demon-
strations" of our opponents—their " great festivals"—
their organization. Look, for example, at the growing
strength and the extraordinary activity and magnitude
of design exhibited by the Anti-corn-law League.
Can such determined eflbrts as are being made by that
body—can its hired lecturers—its local committees,
male and female—the tracts, mendacious but insidious,
with which it is inundating every town, village, and
hamlet throughout the land—fail in inducing, eventually,
a confirmed opinion amongst a vast number, even of
Conservatives, in favour of concession, upon the corn
question, to the demands of the free traders ? They
cannot. All past experience—nay, reason itself—tells
us that they cannot ; and, even at this moment, truth
compels us to acknowledge that this brawling agitation,
sneered at by too many Conservatives and neglected by
most, has sapped the principles of a large, and is daily
sapping the principles of a larger, class of once staunch
supporters of the agricultural, colonial, and industrial
interests of the land. Surely, then, Conservatives who
deprecate concessions by Sir Robert Peel to out-of-door
agitation are not doing their duty to that statesman,
to themselves, or to their country, if they do not, at
once, put forth their energies to meet that agitation upon
its own ground, upon its own platforms, lecturer for lec-
turer, pamphlet for pamphlet ; and thus save us from
the necessity or the temptation for concession, by show-
ing to the Conservative body in the legislature, and to
its eminent leader, that the heart of the people is
sound, and its hand resolute and strong to protect and
stand by the constitution and the true interests of
Great Britain in all their entireness !

This, we repeat, is the duty of Englishmen. Let
this be done; and then, perhaps, we may say with the
reviewer, to Sir Robert Peel, "point to your majority,
when these people assail you with their various nos•
trums." Until it is done—until the great Conservative
party out of doors meet and put down their brawling
opponents, by a refutation of their fallacies or a demon-
stration of their strength—they can neither say, with
truth, to their leader in the House of Commons, " de-
spise them," nor have they any right to ask of that
leader, a determined resistance, when they, who are his
soldiers, thus abandon the field and leave him alone
to bear the whole brunt of the battle !

By a letter dated Poonah, 29th September, from a
surgeon in one of the East India Artillery Regiments,
which arrived by the last Overland Mail, and which
has been kindly shewn to us by a brother of the writer,
a young gentleman in this town, we learn that the
murderer of the late Lord Norbury has been discovered.
It seems that the murderer was in one of the regiments
stationed at Bombay. He was attacked with a violent
illness, and, thinking himself on the point of death,
made a confession before his officers that he was the
man who shot Lord Norbury. By means of great
medical skill the man had got better, and the government
had immediately taken the matter in hand, buthad con-
ducted everything connected with the affair with such
secrecy that nothing further had transpired. We are
not aware that this circumstance has been before men-
tioned ; but as the discovery of the murderer (if it
really have taken place, of which we see no reason to
doubt) will probably lead to other circumstances than
the mere apprehension of the prisoner, we should not
have been fulfilling our duty to the public had we not
given insertion to the extract from this letter..

After a world of cutting, paring, and lopping away
of the more objectionable propositions, announced in
their notice to Parliament, we believe we may now
announce to the world the important fact that the
Commissioners of Birkenhead have abandoned, for
the present, the magnificent schemes of which they
were so recently in hot chase. Such, at least, is the
only rational construction which we can put upon a
communication received yesterday from the Clerk to
the body in question, coupled with the various altera-
tions which we have remarked in the wording of the
notice to Parliament, from the time in which it first ap-
peared in a Chester paper, and was dragged from thence
before the public of Liverpool and Birkenhead, up to
its present publication.
We shall not presume to speculate upon the causes
of the very sudden decision of these great projectors—
a decision which we certainly regret, as we shall he
thereby deprived of a very great pleasure, which we
anticipated so soon as the plans of the " park or parks,
dock or docks," and other great things in contempla-
tion, should have been lodged, with the books of re-
ference—those instructive documents—in the office of
the Clerk of the Peace, at Chester. The same mystery
with which they would fain have clothed their entrance,
envelopes, for the present, their exit from the scene;
and we can only pray to be enlightened by the worthy
0-inissioners or somebody else, and have patience.