The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1842-06-10 00:00:00

Elie Eibtrpoot .Atanbarb.

FRIDAY

MORNING, JUNE 10, 1842

The accounts from the seat of war in India, receive

by the last overland mail, are, taken altogether, of a
more cheering description than we have been favoured
with of late; and yet they contain little upon which,

as a nation, we have great cause to felicitate ourselves.
GHVZNEE has fallen; and, as the result, there is too
great reason to fear that the blood of another thousand
British subjects has stained the war-knives of the fe-

rocious Ghazees. General ENGLAND has been re

pulsed in an attempt to penetrate with a convoy to
Candahar, and has been compelled to retire to his po-
sition to await reinforcements. As a set-off against
these reverses, the gallant SA LE has retained his posi-
tion in Jellalabad ; and, in two successive sorties, has
inflicted severe chastisement upon the hordes of treach-

erous and savage assailants by whom he was blockad-
ed. General NOTT has achieved a similar triumph in
Candahar. The most marked and important success,
however, is that achieved by General POLLOCK, who
has triumphantly forced the dreaded Khyber pass, in
the face of its multitudinous defenders ; and thus, at
once, opened out the path for the release of our entire
army from the Affghanistan territory, and vindicated,
as well, the supremacy of the British arms in the eyes
of the unruly nations by whom our empire in India is
surrounded and, from time to time, disquieted.
Such is the substance of our Indian news. Our
losses are those of a reputed impregnable position, and

the massacre of a thousand of its British defenders;
our gains, that the means of retiring in safety have
been won, and that our army, cooped up in the passes
of this hostile country, have maintained themselves,
and will probably continue to do so, until the full
power of the British empire shall be reached out to
wipe away, in the blood of their treacherous foes, the
memory of the slaughtered thousands who have pe-
rished in this wretched quarrel. Negative triumphs
these !—by which the power or the prosperity of India
or of England is not one whit increased, yet attained,
nevertheless, at a heavy sacrifice of life and treasure.
Would that, in addition to this intelligence, we could
communicate any thing satisfactory with respect to the
unhappy captives at present in the hands of the perfi-
dious native chiefs ! Upon this subject, however, no-
thing definite has reached us, although it is too much
to be feared that the treatment and condition of our
unfortunate countrymen and country women is far from
being one of comfort, if it is not, even, one of personal
suffering and danger. Another mail, however, will no
doubt either assure us of their release from durance,
by the triumphant exercise of British arms or by ran-
-B°M, or confirm those apprehensions of calamity which
will at times flash darkly upon our minds.
In the meanwhile, is it not, we ask, full time that the
people of England should be put in possession of some
knowledge of the policy, and the object of that policy,
which has led to the disasters already sustained, or
which may hereafter be sustained, in this Afghanistan
war ? We seek not, at present, to know the course to
be pursued for the future. We ask not to be informed
whether the government of India will direct its efforts
to the rescue, merely, from danger, of the army em-
barked in it, and to the vindication of the national ho-

'lour, or to permanent conquest. A wise and a just

course—one, too, which it befits England to pursue—
will, we are satisfied, be pursued with regard to the
future, and we are content to wait its actual develope-
merit ; but the country will not be, and ought not to
be, satisfied with anything short of the fullest informa-
tion with respect to the past. In whose quarrel—for
what object—was this unhappy expedition undertaken ?
—an expedition which, from first to last, has been at-
tended with the sacrifice of twenty millions of sterling
money, and of, what is of infinitely greater considera-
tion with us, twenty thousand British lives ;—an expe-
dition which has served only to damage the reputation
of British arms and British statesmanship in the east,
and which may, even, shake the stability of our Indian
empire itself! We demand, upon all these points, the
most ample information; and we ask that information
from the late Governor-General of India and the mem-
bers of the late 117hig administration.
These men it should be,—and not the unfortunate
officers whose conduct is to be submitted to a court
martial, (if they should not previously have fallen vic-
tims to the treachery and bloodthirstiness of their sa-
vage captors,)—Lord Auckland, Lord Palmerston, and
their colleagues it should be, who ought to be arraigned
at the bar of British justice for the disasters which
their policy, in the first instance and chiefly, has brought
down upon their country. Irresolution, incapacity,
and even cowardice may be alleged against the subor-
dinate offenders ; and the grounds of such charges
may be a subject of very proper inquiry for a court
martial;—but it is not with such that the people of
England have to do. It is not the irresolution or
cowardice of any individual officer which has placed
Great Britain in a position where she can neither re-
tract with honour nor advance with safety. It is the
policy and the conduct of the governing power, and not
of its instruments—of the head, and not of the hands—
which are in fault ; and upon that governing power—
upon that head—and not upon the mere registering
instruments of its rash and unwise determinations, the
responsibility for accumulated disaster and difficulty
must rest, and PUNISHMENT, if deserved, must

The motion of Lord Ashley, on Wednesday night,

for leave to bring in a bill to regulate the age and sex
of persons to be employed in mines and colleries, was

received with the universal concurrence of all parties
in the House of Commons; and elicited, at the same

ime, by the manner in which it was introduced by the
,oble lord, a degree of admiration of the praiseworthy

efforts of that high-minded and excellent young noble-
man which it has rarely fallen to the lot of any indi-

vidual to excite in the hearts of his fellow-men. This

sentiment, we venture to predict, will not be confined
within the walls of parliament, but will be echoed
through the length and breadth of the land, by the
voices of an entire Christian people; and if there is
one man to whom the affections of that people should
turn, that man is he who from his exalted station—
from the bosom of luxury—has devoted himself to the
advocacy of the rights and interests of the children of
the poor ; and greatly do we mistake the character of

our countrymen if the name of that man—the name of

Lord Ashley—is not, for all time to come, treasured up
in their hearts with an enduring admiration of his noble

efforts, in behalf of the afflicted and oppressed, and of
love for his exalted and exemplary character.
The astounding disclosures of the commission ap-
pointed to enquire into the condition of our mining
population, which we have laid from time to time be-
fore our readers, have created throughout Great Britain

a universal demand that a system so horribly degrading
—so disgusting and atrocious—should no longer be
tolerated in a Christian country. It will no longer be

endured that the individual avarice of any man, or any

;et of men, should be permitted thus to reduce their
-ellow beings to the level of beasts—aye, lower than

And yet we have seen the time when the
roposition to interfere for the correction of a similar

at level !

system—one little removed from the atrocity of the
mining system—was stigmatized by not a few of the
very men who, on Wednesday were loud in their praise
of Lord Ashley's measure, as an unwarranted inter-
ference with the rights of labour and an attempted op-

wession of the labourers themselves. Who can forget
he ribald abuse levelled against the lamented SADLER
'or his exertions to ameliorate the condition of the fac-
:ory children ? At the present day even, is the name

. _
of RICHARD OASTLER ever pronounced by the lip of
liberalism, without coarse and slanderous vituperation ?

Yet where is the difference, except in degree, between
the system which these men would have modified—the

,yranny and cruelty which they would have mitigated—

and that system which Lord Ashley proposes to put
down altogether ?
Assuredly, there is none ! The principle is the same,

—and that principle is now established,—that the Bri-
tish legislature will interfere to put down infant and
female oppression in our colieries—that it will not per-
mit the parents, even, of the sufferers to doom the
childhood of their offspring to the labour of the brute
creation. By this measure the legislature expressly
declares that the moral well being of society is, in its
opinion, far above the selfish considerations of money-
getting far above the utilitarian considerations of
the political economists. By this measure the as-
sumed sacred character of the rights of labour—the
right to grind the sinews and the bones of our fellow-
man into the dust which strews the feet of the manu-

'acturing Moloch—is directly impugned. The labourer

is told that, even if purchasers can be found, he shall
not be permitted to sell his wife or his daughters into
a slavery more horrible than any ever perpetrated in
the tropics ; and these, even, if degraded enough to be
consenting parties to their own further degradation,
are told that such self sacrifice, and the indecencies and
suffering by which it must be accompanied, will from
henceforth be strictly interdicted.
We rejoice at this decision. We rejoice at the enun-
ciation of that principle which it establishes. The la-
bourer of Great Britain—not the mining labourer
alone, but the manufacturing labourer as well, for how
can we turn back from its full application to all classes
—is no longer to be treated as the mere adjunct of the
instrument of his labour—the crank of the machine at
which he toils—an unsentient and soulless piece of clay,
to be used up in the workshop of society, and, when
exhausted, to be thrown aside to rot in the lumber-room
of the world. The same hand, we trust, which has
been stretched out to raise the mining labourer from
his degradation—to restore the crippled infant and the
brutalized female to the light of civilization and of day,
will be extended to the factories and the workshops of
England, in which a picture is to be seen, if not so dark
as that which has been of late presented to the world,
yet one which irresistibly calls upon us to relieve its
shadows and mitigate the suffering and demoralization
ith which it is lamentably rife.
We trust sincerely that Lord Ashley will not stop
short in the noble career which he has marked out for
himself, but that he will rather go on, with added ener-
gies, in his proposed effort to wring from the utilitarian
faction in the House of Commons, and from the
government of Sir Robert Peel, even, a satisfactory
working measure for the regulation of the hours of
labour in the factories of Great Britain. It is noto-
rious that the present bill, with all its inspectors to
enforce its provisions, is inefficient to put down the
abuses for whose suppression it was designed. If the
factory population be improved since its enactment;
if the tyranny and wearing character of the system be
mitigated; it is not to that bill, but to the operation of
public opinion and the diminution of the temptations
to overworking, that the change is attributable. A
stringent measure is still loudly called for; is required
as well for the protection of the poor factory children
as for the protection of the honest manufacturer
himself. Such a bill is desired by the sound and well
principled amongst all classes of our manufacturing
community ; and in the carrying of such a one his
lordship will receive a measure of warm support from
the now awakened people of England, which will
enable him to withstand, alike, the furious denuncia_
tions of those whose malpractices it will put down, and
the sophistries and cold-blooded dogmatising of the
utilitarian economists, from the effects of whose grasp-
ing avarice it is calculated to protect the strength, the
health, and the lives even of the working population
of the country.

We believe we shall not be suspected as being any
other than well-wishers to our Canadian fellow-coun-
trymen. We have ever been, on the contrary, the ad-
vocate of colonial interests, generally ; and we have,
certainly, never undervalued the importance, or de-

sired to interrupt the progress towards prosperity and
greatness, of our American colonies. We regard
British America, indeed, as one of our most valuable

possessions; we recognise in the great bulk of its po-
pulation the descendants of British ancestors—of men
who have trod the same green hills ; who have breathed
the same fresh breezes ; who have walked by the same
bright streams with ourselves ; and we value their in-
terests, their liberties, and their welfare, as highly as
we do our own. And yet we must confess that we
cannot sympathise with the fears expressed by many
of the ardent friends of Canada with respect to the
alleged injurious operation of the proposed new tim-
ber duties upon the interests of that colony, or the
justice of acting upon them to the injury of the people
of Great Britain. In particular, we cannot approve
of the course pursued, with respect to those duties, by
our valued representative, Sir Howard Douglas.
In the committee upon the new tariff on Tuesday
night, Sir Howard moved, as an amendment to the
government schedule, " that the duties on and after
the 10th day of October next, should be fixed at 30s.
upon foreign timber, and 38s. upon foreign deals, both
per load, and that no ulterior reduction, as contem-
plated, should take place in either." This amendment,
the honourable baronet stated, "he had been strongly
pressed to submit, and had had no less than twenty-
three petitions in support of it confided to his care.
These petitions," he added, " were petitions front
Canada." We have no intention to enter into the
question as to the merits of this proposition, (which, in
fact, were ably dealt with by the Vice-President of the
Board of Trade,) as we have already expressed our
entire approval of this portion of the new tariff, which
we are satisfied is in accordance with that of the great
majority of our Conservative fellow-townsmen. The
hostility towards it, expressed by Sir Howard, is, we
are satisfied, not the hostility of the Canadian people,
but of a mere section of that people, peculiarly in-
terested in opposing it. But we may reasonably ask,
by whom is it that Sir Howard was "pressed" to take
this course ? Was it by his constituents? Are the
consumers of Liverpool and the majority of the timber
trade of Liverpool nobodies in the honourable baronet's
eyes ? Are the ship-builders and ship-carpenters of
Liverpool not to be considered, except as second to the
same classes in New Brunswick ? Is Sir Howard
Douglas, in fact, the member for Liverpool, or the
representative only of one particular Canadian interest?
We are sorry to have to make these remarks ; but
we do think that the honourable baronet has in this
matter displayed a little obliviousness of his true posi-
tion,—a little slight, too, of the constituency which he
represents ; and our duty to the public and to our
fellow-townsmen compels us to bring the subject
before his notice.