The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1842-11-15 00:00:00

TUESDAY MORNING, NOVEMBER 15, 1842

We look forward with painful anxiety to the arrival
of
.our next despatches from India and China. We
are now, it must be evident to all who have bestowed
the slightest attention upon the details brought us by the
last mail, approaching, both in our opium war, and in
that hitherto calamitous struggle in Affghanistan, to a
decisive crisis. In China, our forces were, at the last
dates, rapidly nearing the .stronghold of the enemy,
where the crowning blow, to be effectual, must be
In our Indian war, the British forces had
again plunged into the passes of Cabool, and were in
full march to that capital. The next mail, therefore,
we confidently anticipate, will assure us that the
hitherto-stubborn Emperor of the Chinese has bowed
his neck before the conquering arms of England, and
that the butcheries of Affghanistan have been atoned
for in blood upon the same sod which witnessed the
savage slaughter of an entire British army.

struck

We cannot bring ourselves to contemplate, in
either of these struggles, a result less satisfactory than
a hardly-earned victory. We can barely imagine the
poisibility of a calamity so sweeping and irreparable
as would be a defeat sustained in them. And yet
what is our position in either of these struggles. In
both—in China and in Affghanistan—we fight against
an entire people. In both we fight at vast distances
from our resources. Above all, in both we fight in a
causeless and an unjust quarrel. No good man, con-
templating all the circumstances of our position, dare
lay his hand upon his heart and say that, as a nation,
we deserve a blessing upon our arms. No man can
lay his hand upon his heart and say that victory, the
most complete and signal, can add one laurel to the
brow of England's monarch, or one trophy to the
fame in arms of her gallant troops.
We anticipate, certainly, a triumph for our arms in
both these quarrels ; for we have " a giant's power,"
and—shame upon us for the deed !—we have "used it
like a giant," to trample upon a defenceless people,
and to mingle in a quarrel which concerns us not.
But admit that victory is ours, and that the next
eastern mail will inform us of the submission of the

Chinese, gained by the massacre of thousands of their
unwarlike population, and of the fall of Cabool into
our hands at a vast expense of blood and treasure :
two questions will then present themselves, and must
be answered—" For what have we been fighting ?" and
" what use must we, or can we, make of our victories ?"
These questions, we repeat, must be answered, and
that, too, at the bar of Parliament. The honour of
England demands it; outraged humanity demands it;
the blood of the thousands of British subjects which
dyes the rocks of Affghanistan, cries up, before
heaven, to the assembled legislators of Christian Eng-
land, for their judgment upon the statesmen by whose
misdeeds the ineffaceable infamy of these disgraceful
and useless wars has been fastened upon the name of
their country.

Let us see what answer can be given to these ques-
tions. And first—" For what have we been fighting?"
In China, to force upon it a noxious drug, to demo-
ralise and debauch three hundred millions of people !
We have fought, there, in a smuggler's quarrel, for
the right of introducing delirious and gibbering idiocy
amongst an ignorant population, in defiance of the
declared will of their government. Yes : England,
who boasts, and justly boasts, of her noble efforts to
put down slavery throughout the world, thirsts to be
permitted to inflict upon a whole people that worst of
slavery—the slavery of the mind—THE SLAVERY OF
INTOXICATION ! Shame upon US! shame upon the
lips which dare to extenuate the NATIONAL INFAMY
which wastes the best blood of England in a quarrel
so utterly indefensible and vile !

And, in Affghanistan, for what have we been
fighting ? To force upon a free people, as their ruler,
a licentious and profligate dotard whose yoke they had
cast off as intolerable, and who only breathed in safety,
within his own capital, when fenced round with British
bayonets ! Yes, in such a quarrel it is—for a wretch
stained with a thousand vices—for a being as trea-
cherous and ungrateful as he was cowardly—that
England embarked her hitherto honoured name in this
calamitous struggle. What marvel, we ask, that an
all-seeing Providence has withheld its blessing from
her arms, and that her every step against the liberties
of this people has been marked with shame and
slaughter ?

And when victory shall have crowned the exertions
of our troops—when hecatombs have been slain, and
vengeance glutted—what use can we make of our vic-
tories ? Shall we direct our efforts to colonisation ?
Shall we erect a second eastern empire beyond the
Indus, and subject China to the British crown ?
Surely not. Surely the colonial possessions of Great
Britain are amply sufficient in extent to satisfy the
most boundless ambition ; and even if this were not
the case, and we could dream of the appropriation of
our conquests, through what an ocean of blood must
we wade before we could occupy either China or
Affghanistan by any other than an armed and con-
stantly pressing tyranny ?

At every step we have made, or are making, in these
conquests, we are sewing inextinguishable hate in the
breasts of the population which we vanquish. If the
cause in which we are fighting is not a Christian
cause, neither are the weapons with which we fight
Christian weapons. The reckless destruction of vine-
yards, of fruit trees, and of villages, is a mode of war-
fare which British soldiers have as yet little practiqed.
But in this Affghanistan war every license appears to
be practised :

" While our troops were advancing," remarks the Bombay
Times, " parties were detached to set fire to the houses and
villages; and the force afterwards remained on the ground,
employed in cutting down the vineyards and mulberry trees,
' to which much value and importance were attached by the
enemy ! ' The wanton and useless havoc occasioned, and
applauded by a portion of the press, will not, it is said, be
recovered for from 25 to 30 years ! The inhabitants were seen
watching from the pine-forests far up amongst the hills the
ravage and devastation which continued in progress after re-
sistance had ceased—having never, probably, in their own
savage contests witnessed war carried on against unoffending
orchards because they were valued and could not be restored !"

What wonder, we ask, if the hoarded vengeance of
a wronged people, for such acts committed before
their very eyes, should visit us at every step we make
in our unjust invasion of their soil; and what chance

of colonisation or extension of our commerce, in a
land thus strewed with hideous wrecks, and peopled
with wild and sange men, sworn to avenge their ruin
upon the head of the oppressor whose hand has
made them houseless wanderers upon their native
hills.

This subject, we repeat, whatever be the issue of the
crisis which is at hand, must be gone into immediately
upon the assembling of Parliament; and the questions
which we have put must be answered, and satisfac-
torily answered. No garbled despatches—no falsified
correspondence must, this time, be suffered to blind the
eyes and to warp the judgment of the legislature and
the public. The full light of day must be permitted to
fall upon the darkest recesses of the Foreign Of in
Downing-street; and even the secret council of the
government of India must no longer cloak from the