The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1842-06-03 00:00:00

FRIDAY MORNING, JUNE 3, 1842

Verily—
" There are more things in heaven and earth,
Than are dreamt of in our philosophy ; "
and, amongst those unheard of, undreamt of things, is
the fact that a Whig member—a " liberal and free
trader par excellence—should be found hardy enough
to stand up, in his place in the British House of Com-
mons, in defence of that robbery of the working
classes, the iniquitous truck system ! Yet such a
man, such a " liberal," such a free trader, has been
found in the person of the honourable member for
Bolton,— the peripatetic negociator of commercial
treaties,—Dr. BOWRING ! Nay, more even than this
lusus naturce has been discovered in the person of the
same pure and patriotic worthy—this lover of com-
missions, inquiries, and the pounds, shillings, and
pence resulting therefrom—the fees per diem and per
mile ; for not only does the learned Polyglot avow him-
self the defender of the giant truck fraud, but he has
been figuring, as well, in the character of a peripatetic
missionary and getter up of petitions from the duped
sufferers themselves, in favour of this very system,
which robs every working man, woman, and child of
a huge portion of the wages of their toil, and forbids
them to call even that portion their own and to expend
it as they please ! _

On Monday night, we find from the reports of the
proceedings in the House of Commons that

" Mr. Ferrand presented a petition from eighty-four
labourers in Wales, stating their regret at hearing that an
hon. member of that house had been in their neighbourhood
getting signatures to a document which purported to be a
declaration of theirs in favour of the truck system. They
begged to inform the house that they had no market town
there, and yet they could buy their articles 15 per cent.
cheaper than at the truck shops; but even if they could not
do so, they wished to be allowed to purchase their articles
at the cheapest market. In conclusion, they begged the
house to take some strong measure to put down the truck
system for ever. He (Mr. Ferrand) begged leave to move
that this petition be referred to the Committee of Wages."

Who would conclude, after the indignant protesta-
tions of the entire league party of their innocence of
truck practices, that this member of the House of Com-
mons was any other than some Tory mine or mill-
owner, anxious to protect the system by which his ill-
got gains were wrung from the oppressed working
people ? And yet such is not the fact. The man in
question is no other than Dr. Bowring, the free trade
member for Bolton, as we discover by the following ad-
mission from his own lips :

" Dr. Bowring said, that on that motion he might be allowed
to say a few words. It was perfectly true that he had been
in the neighbourhood alluded to, and it was perfectly true
that he had been speaking to the workmen in the Campion
works. He asked them what was their opinion with respect
to the truck system. They said that from it some of them
experienced much benefit. They also said that several of
the workmen had been induced to sign a petition against the
system, but they had since expressed great regret at having
done so. They all believed that a small shop conducted on
the truck system was bad, but if it was conducted by a large
company, it contributed to the general happiness and com-
fort of the district."
Hear this, working men of Bolton ! Was this man
sent to parliament by your suffrages to become the
hired apologist (the doctor never works for nothing)
and the hired itinerant supporter of the truck system
Surely not! But listen to the doctrine which the learned
doctor puts into your mouths; for it is your affair as
well as that of the working men of Wales. " A small
shop conducted upon the truck system is bad ; but if it
is conducted by a large company"—such a one, for in-
stance, as can afford to pay this eminent free trader his
guineas per diem and his travelling expenses—" then
the system of truck contributes to the general happiness
and comfort of the district" ! This, men of Bolton,
is your free trade member—this apologist of fraud—
this flagrant charlatan—this menial slave of the money-
ocracy of the factory and the mining districts ! As A
HUMBUG, we always knew him, gorging upon the
public purse, fattening upon plunder; a needy, seedy
fellow, whose patriotism was regulated in degree by the
guineas which he could screw from the purchaser of
his hireling pen. But that even Bowring could stoop
to falsify the recorded opinions of a lifetime, spent in
the advocacy of liberal principles of every kind and
extent, by this sale of himself to THE TRUCK MON-
STER, is one of those strange and unaccountable
things of which our philosophy never dreamt in its
wildest moods !

After this, in the mouth of every working man of
Bolton, let the impostor be TRUCK BOWR:NG to the
end of his days !

Once more the felon hand of an assassin has been
raised against the life of England's young and graci-
ous Queen ; and the heart of an entire nation is bowed
down in fervent gratitude to that all-seeing Providence
whose merciful intervention has protected her from the
death-dealing weapon. Thanks to that Providence,
the blood of a fond wife and mother—the daughter of
a long line of England's kings—has not stained the
soil of that free land which is blessed with her gentle
sway; and Englishmen cannot, as yet, be pointed at
by the finger of scorn as a nation of murderers !

We have given in another place the full details of
this attempted crime, the consummation of which
would have widowed the hearts of an affectionate and
loyal people. A blush may well be called into the
cheek at their perusal ; the blood may well rise with
indignation at the contemplation of an atrocity, so
heartless, directed against one so unoffending—so emi-
nently calculated to win affection and admiration—ra
ther than to move the baser passions of even the basest
heart. We may well -wonder that in Great Britain
should he found a wretch in whose breast the thought,
even, of such a deed could find harbour ; but the feel-
ing which will rise far above all these—the abiding
feeling, stirred up within us by the contemplation of the
whole circumstances corm ected with this occurrence—
is one of deep admiration► of the calm courage, worthy
of the daughter and the mother of a race of England's
monarchs, evinced by her Majesty throughout this
trying occasion.

It was announced in the House of Lords by the
Duke of Wellington, and in the House of Commons
by Sir Robert Peel, -that her Majesty had been pre-
pared for the meditate d attack ; and that, in the true
spirit of her race, she had determined to meet and
brave its results, rattle .r than submit to be deprived of
the pleasure attenday it upon her usual appearances
amongst her affection ate people ; and, more than this,
she would brave that attack alone, unattended by any
except the partner eof her throne and the husband of
her choice. With tl lat firmness and unshrinking con-
stancy displayed. by WOMAN, in the hour of trial, more
' triumphantly than by man himself, she presented her-
' self in the boa im of her people, confiding in their love
and braving fhe ass assin's weapon; and although a
slight tremour: might agitate her and the firmly strung
nerve relax 'itself, when the shock had passed by and
she found found h
.erself enabled to look back upon the dark
she
h adpassed over in safety, her bearing
throughout:
was one which no Englishman—no human
beingea x
contemplate, without his spirit being stirred
up to feelings
of enthusiastic admiration. Dear as
this nolfie toot,
people......uand Queen has ever been to her loyal
danger and ervecti
Ydear—it is not until this hour of
dread
sure the full nobili t that we have been permitted to mea-
We shall not no\ vY ofher lofty nature.
attempt to give expression to the
reflections which th is diabolicalml attempt is calculated to
excite in every think ing
the horror, which it We will nc.t aggravate
as spread throughout the empire,
by countenancing Che supposition,that the
wretched man, by wl 'lose hand it
was even,
ma de, was in
connection with any 'arty in the country
or even with
any individual accomplices. We trust that
no
conclusions ape warra: stable. For the honour of Egsuch
land we trust thatxi: CG-KILLING iS not as yet a
pnor:
tion of the political w, !apons of any party or any Class
amongst us ; and that the present attempt has sprung
only from the perverte d mind of the miscreant himself

who committed the offence. But when we see, as in

this cas

life of the Sovereign of these

realms perilled

the rash hand of an assassin, and
are assured, by the blameless life of that beloved being,
as well as by the station Of the criminal himself, that
no personal feeling can have existed to impel him to
the perpetration of the deed which he contemplated;
when we are informed, moreover, that an attempted

perpetration of this very act on a preceding day—the

Sabbath—was' accompanied by,violent denunciations of
a monarchy, and of the person of the Sovereign her-
self, as the source of all the evils under which large
classes of the community labour, we are compelled to
inquire how far the existence of such a feeling is to be
attributed to the incendiary tone of those agitators of
the people, whose ceaseless aim it appears to be to
work upon human passions, and to attain the end
which they have in view through the instrumentality
of popular commotion and outrage.
We had no wish to have singled out, as open to this
imputation, any particular party or the advocates of
any particular policy in the state ; we have no wish to
revive the memory of the bygone efforts of Whiggery
to prop up its feeble existence by appeals to the brute
passions of the multitude; but we cannot, whilst no-
ticing what we must consider as the fruit of such agi-
tation, pass by, without visiting with our severest cen-
sure the tone which has of late been assumed by the
propagandists of the anti-corn-law agitation. Within
the past week this town, and we have no doubt every
town in the empire, has been placarded with a docu-
ment emanating from that factious body, the Anti-
Corn-Law League, than which it is scarcely possible
to imagine a document more provocative of bad pas-
sions and the violent developement of such passions.
In the document in question, the operation of the
laws of the realm have been deliberately pointed out
as MURDEROUS ; in the same document the enacters
of those laws have been as deliberately designated
MURDERERS; and we appeal to the common sense of
every lover of order amongst us—of every lover of the
person of his Sovereign—whether such appeal, so cal-
culated to stir up the fanaticism of ignorant and vulgar
malcontents, should he permitted to circulate, with
impunity, amongst any well ordered and loyal com-
munity.

We shall not, however, we repeat, enter into the
consideration of such topics at the present moment,
however appropriate it may be for the enforcement of
their serious consideration. Our object now, is to
felicitate our fellow countrymen upon the escape of
their beloved Queen from the doom which a miscreant
hand had well nigh brought down upon her ; and we
shall take leave of the subject by again expressing that
feeling, which has moved the heart of the entire corn-
munity amongst whom we live, of fervent gratitude to
that Almighty Power which has preserved for England
the life of her beloved Monarch, the descendant of a
revered Protestant ancestry, and the mother, we trust,
of a long line of Protestant and right English kings.
Long may she live, blessing and blessed, to sway the
destinies of a loyal, happy, and Christian people !

For the last few weeks the lying energies of the
Whig press have been exhausting themselves in the
effort to depreciate the utility, as a working measure,
of the new Corn Bill of Sir Robert Peel's Government.
Amongst the rest, the Liverpool Times, a paper dis-
tinguished for its stupidity, asserted ten days ago that
not more foreign wheat than was sufficient to make a
breakfast for the population of Liverpool had been re-
leased from bond since the coming into operation of
the new law ; and the Manchester Guardian, not so
stupid certainly, and therefore more entitled to notice,
maintained that Sir Robert Peel's measure was in its
operation no material relaxation of the old law. We
sheaved at the time the falsehood of the assertions of
both these worthy associates ; and we now beg to offer
to their notice a few figures, which will demonstrate,
if not to their wilfully or naturally obtuse perceptions,
at least to the perceptions of ordinary men, that in its
operation the measure of Sir Robert Peel is calculated
to secure, at once, to the consumer, the necessary sta-
ple of life at a fair and moderate rate, and at the same
time to protect the farmer and the revenue from the
injurious consequences of speculations to introduce
foreign wheat in inordinate quantities at a nominal
rate of duty.
The quantity of foreign corn upon which duty has
been paid in this port alone, since the coming into
operation of the new law up to the 30th of May, is,
according to the custom-house returns—of wheat,
38,909 quarters, and of flour, 61,980 barrels. Not one
ounce of this quantity would have come into the mar-
ket under the operation of the old law; and nearly the
whole of this, we are informed, upon the authority of
the circular of Messrs. Robert Makin and Sons, of this
town,—an authority which is of the highest credit in
the corn market,—has been sold for consumption.
And, what has been the effect of this timely adaptation
of the supply to the demand of the consumers ? Why,
that the speculation of capitalists has been paralized ;
that moderate prices have been secured to the con-
sumer ; that the revenue has been protected ; that the
farmer has been protected ; and that, with the prospect
of a plentiful harvest before us, we have not been tan-
talized with alternate famine and superabundant supply!
But a week ago we were assured by the opponents
of this law—we were assured by capitalists even, who
were favourable to the principles upon which it was
based, that, under its operation speculation could still
do what it willed with the staple of subsistence in these
realms. We were told of extensive combinations for a
rise in the price of bread corn. What is the result ?
Why, that the relief afforded to the consumer—the fact
that every quarter of foreign grain in bond throughout
Great Britain is at present in the market, for consump-
tion—have, without injuring the consumer or the pro-
ducer, ensured to the revenue an adequate return from
the admission of foreign grain into consumption; to
the farmer moderate protection and to the consumer a
moderate price of one of the chief necessaries of life !

LOCAL NEWS.

FIRE KING.—The steamer Fire King, Captain I.ll`Kellar,
arrived here on Tuesday last, making her passage from
Greenock in sixteen hours and a half.

SIR HOWARD DOUGLAS.—We are gratified to learn, that
our able and respected representative, Sir Howard Douglas,
has within the last few days received several very flattering
proofs of the high estimation in which he is held by the in-
habitants of New Brunswick, and of the opinion entertained
of the character of his administration while governor of that
province, besides those we mentioned on Tuesday. Ad-
dresses have been presented to the honourable baronet, at
his private residence, in Green-street, Grosvenor-square,
London, from the merchants, magistrates, and other inhabit-
ants of Fredericton and its immediate vicinity ; from the
Chamber of Commerce, St. Andrew's; from the magistrates
and inhabitants of St. Andrew's; and from the clergy, ma-
gistrates, merchants, and other inhabitants of the county of