The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1842-01-21 00:00:00

" If their lungs

Receive our air, that moment they are free ;
They touch our country, and their shackles fall."

The New York journalist follows up his miserably
futile argument in the following cavalier and jaunty

" We wish with all our hearts," he says, " that neither
England nor ourselves had any slaves ; but while we both of
us have them, we shall teach the government and people of
that country, that while we have no wish to interfere with
their domestic institutions, we have not the slightest idea of
permitting them for a moment to interfere with ours. Our
slave system may be very wrong, but the wrong is no concern
of others. Whatever we may see fit to consider property is
property; when it may chance to get within the jurisdiction
of a government which has just thought proper to relinquish
her own ownership in the same kind of property, we shall
maintain the majesty of our own laws by claiming and re-
claiming it. If the British authorities see fit to aid our
negroes i❑ running away from their owners, they must pay
for them, that is all."
It would be a waste of time to offer any serious re-
ply to such a piece of sheer impertinence as we have
submitted to us in this passage. We will only say,
that it would indeed be very well for the " experimen-
tal republic " if she had " no slaves " nor law of sla-
very in her states. It would, amongst other things,
save her the disgrace of affecting to keep pace with
the old states of Europe in an enlightened condemna-
tion and repression of the traffic in human beings,
and yet, with the consciousness of a thief who carries
the property he has stolen about his person, refusing
to join with them in a treaty of mutual search which
would test the sincerity of her professions. It would
relieve her journalists also from the necessity of deal-
ing in such wholesale falsities and ridiculous swagger
as the Enquirer exhibits in his commentaries. The
British authorities in New Providence have done no
more than give due effect to British law; they have
set the strangers who called at their port at liberty,
since there was no other charge against them but that

" they were black ;" they have denied the claim to
property in them, or any others of the human family,
standing upon the glorious foundation of our British
charter, and they have wisely and prudently left the
American claim of compensation to be settled else-
where.

The visit of the King of Prussia to this country
upon so interesting,an occasion as the baptism of the_
infant heir to the throne, is an event by which all ranks
of her Majesty's faithful subjects feel intensely grati-
fied. The selection by her Majesty of such a sponsor—
and the gracious and emphatic manner in which the
royal personage so selected, has undertaken to do
honour to the request—constitute in their combina-
tion a circumstance replete with suggestions of the
most lively and agreeable kind. People naturally look
upon it as auspicious when their rulers manifest an en-
lightened concern for the sacred duties of religion—
are diligent, though not ostentatious, in the discharge
of their duties themselves—and still further follow up
such excellent beginings, by cultivating the friendship
of, and cementing their alliance with, other princes and
rulers of like sentiments and disposition with them-
selves ; and it is the happiness of the people of this
country at the present moment, to witness this pleasing
concurrence of events, and to rejoice in the observance
of them. They will welcome, probably on this very
day, the good King of Prussia to their shore, and hail
his arrival as the personal friend of our Gracious Queen;
they will pay him every honour, not merely because
he bears a crowned head, and constitutes an important
member of the European alliance of Sovereigns, but
because he subscribes to the same religious faith with
themselves—because he is a Protestant Prince—and
has given proof that he is by no means willing to bear
that honourable title in vain. We feel quite persuaded
that our infant Prince of \Vales could not have a more
suitable godfather; the nation was delighted by the
announcement of the choice, and they will now wit-
ness with untningled satisfaction the assumption of that
character by the Prussian monarch in person in the
approaching truly august and solemn ceremonial.
It is an apt occasion for drawing more closely the
bands of an holy alliance and lasting friendship. Our
illustrious visitor has already testified in a very re-
markable manner his earnest desire to unite himself
and people with England -on the sacred basis of a