The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1842-12-23 00:00:00

legislation

And what be these principles ? we may he asked.
We shall, in reply, merely glance at them, and enlarge
upon them on an early occasion. We say, then, that
parliament has admitted its right to require that the
wages of the labourer should be paid in money. Enforce
that principle ; put down the truck system ! Again,
parliament has admitted its right to protect infant
labour. Give stringency to a measure for that pur-
pose ! The most important remedial effort, however,
we believe is to be made through the instrumentality
of the existing poor law ; but upon that point we must
reserve ourselves. It is far too important to be argued
in the little space which we have left ourselves.

We did purpose, on Tuesday last, saying a few
words, in reply to the article addressed to us in the
Journal on Saturday. On reconsideration, however,
we are compellea to decline following our contem-
porary into the fresh ground which he has broken.
He will himself, we feel assured, acknowledge the
reasonableness of our decision; and allow that the
controversy, upon which we first entered, has been
fairly fought out. To which of the parties to that
controversy victory inclines, we say not. We still
maintain our own opinions unchanged ; our contem-
porary, no doubt, maintains his. But this much, we
feel convinced, a candid man would acknowledge that,
for the guidance of those who wish to enter upon an
examination of the subject, some important truths have
been conceded on both sides, and the question stript,
as far as possible, of false surmises. The Journal—
we give him credit for so doing—has argued the broad
question with straightforward honesty and ability,
casting aside as unworthy of him, the claptraps with
which it is sought to be mystified; and equal honesty
at least, our opponent will perhaps concede to our-
selves. We have never condescended--when arguing
with a fair antagonist—to blink one tittle of our sin-
cere convictions, or to keep any thing in the back-
ground, with respect to this important question : and
we shall never condescend to offer a word in favour of
the present or any other system of corn-laws, without
the conviction moving us that it is the best for the good
of all, which human wisdom can frame under the ex-
isting circumstances of the country.

With these few words, which are due in courtesy to
our contemporary, we leave the subject, at least as one
peculiarly between him and ourselves.

The Manchester Guardian, of Saturday last, comes
forward to defend the Anti-corn-law League from the
trenchant blows which have recently been dealt upon
that body by The Quarterly Review; and, as a con-
clusive argument, in depreciation of the telling cha-
racter of the blows in question, remarks upon the fact,
real or assumed, that, as yet, they have been visited
with scarcely a word of comment from the Conserva-
tive press. We do not presume to explain why—if
the fact be so—our Conservative brethren have passed
by the article in question unnoticed ; but for ourselves
we can say, without any disparagement of The Quar-
terly, that we have not, hitherto, referred to it, for the
simple reason that it does not contain a fact or an
inference of which we have not long ago been aware,
and upon which we have not, at some time, freely
remarked. So far as we are concerned, then, the
Guardian's defence of his friends is of little effect; and
the same may be said of almost the entire Conservative
press of this district. That press has watched the
doings of the Anti-corn-law League for itself; and has
therefore not to travel to the pages of The Quarterly
Review to be amazed, or alarmed, at their dishonesty
or their dangerous character.
But we might reasonably—did we not know the
man—be amazed, though we should certainly not be
alarmed, to find, in the Manchester Guardian, the
apologist of the doings of the League. It is certainly
not so long ago as to have escaped the memory of the
public, that our contemporary denounced the pioceed-
ings of that body, quite as bitterly as we, or any other
member of the Conservative press, have ever done.
We admit that he has crept round, from the position
of an opponent to that of a thick-and-thin advocate,
with the cleverness which he ordinarily displays in
similar Jim Crow movements. The fact, however, of
the change wrought upon the sensitive mind of our
contemporary is an ample excuse for the changed
views with which he twits us with regarding the
power and influence of the League, coupled as it is
with some facts which the article of The Qaarterly has
again dragged into prominent notice. By their own
showing, the Anti-corn-law League has expended in
agitation, during the twelve or fourteen months com-
mencing in August, 1841, up to a month or two from
the present time, a sum of about NINETY THOUSAND
POUNDS ! It is now raising the further sum of FIFTY
THOUSAND POUNDS; and boasts that it will succeed
in raising double that sum ! Are we not, then, we ask,
justified in changing our opinion of a body which has
made and is making such gigantic efforts—which
wields such vast sums, and squanders them so
lavishly ? May we not estimate somewhat differently
its powers of conversion to its own opinions, when we
contemplate the changed tone, with respect to it, of
such an oracle as the Manchester Guardian ?

We will not ask our contemporary to refer back to
his own file, and compare his present opinions of the
League agitation with those which he held a very brief
while ago. There must be gall and wormwood suffi-
cient—more than we would wish to our bitterest
enemy—in the conviction, which must "sit heavy"
upon his pen, daily and hourly, that the world is not so
oblivious of the past as apostacy such as his own would
fain have it be !

The London Times of Saturday last has, with a com-
mendable spirit, called the attention of the public to a
case—which came before
_Barons Alderson and Gur-
ney, in the Central Criminal Court, on the 15th inst.—
in which five seamen of the barque Clydesdale, of this
port, were tried on a charge of causing the death of a
shipmate (a black, named Keel), by hauling him out of
his sick bed below, with, in the first instance, a rope
round his neck, and afterwards exposing him on deck,
(on the Ist instant, while off Holyhead,) in a state of
almost nudity, and with, as one of the witnesses said,
"no appearance of life in him"—the result of which
cruel treatment, added to his previous illness, was, that
he never again spoke, and died in a few minutes. The
prisoners were brought up, in the first instance, at our
police-court, and we reported the entire evidence at the
time. We also supplied in our blast publication the
principal facts adduced at the Criminal Court, so that,
as they must be fresh in the recollection of our readers,
we need not here recapitulate them. On both occa-
sions, the evidence was precisely similar, with this
exception—that the surgeon (Mr. Woods, of this
town), who made the post mortern examination, and
here attributed the death of the deceased to "suffoca-
tion," admitted (most strangely) on cross-examination
in the higher court, that it might possibly, though not
probably, have been produced from the exposure to
cold—the deceased being a native of, and just arrived
from, Bombay, and consequently more liable than a
European to be affected by the inclemency of the wea-
ther. Although there could be no doubt of the guilt
of the parties charged, the death being laid in the in-
dictment as having arisen from " strangulation or
suffocation," without any alternative count whatever—
to meet on other grounds either the charge made or a
minor one of gross assault—and the surgeon having
thus admitted an alternative possible cause (though that
cause equally involved the manslaughter), the learned
judges were under the necessity of declaring that the
allegations in the indictment were not (from its being
so exclusively framed) sustained by the evidence, and